[Zone-MR]

Hmm... I have a DVD-RW drive so dunno about +RW. I know that -R/-RW disks are cheaper and more common...

I download most of my movies in DIVX format as single (approx 650MB files) of kazaa. Then I can convert them to whatever I want. DivX offers the best compression and is OK if I want to watch them on my PC. If I want to burn I need to encode to MPEG2 which increases the filesize a lot. The encoding/conversion proccess can take several hours even on a very fast PC.

Downloading whole, uncompressed DVD rips is not reccomended unless you have a super fast connection as the average DVD will be 5-10 GB. Note that if you rip a DVD yourself most of the DVDs you rent or buy are dual layer and hence more than 4.7GB. To burn them to DVD-R you will need to reencode them to reduce their filesize in most cases...

Merging multiple VCDs I imagine would be easy, but am unaware of the names of any programs that do so... Im just saying I would be very surprised if they didnt exist....