Learning Compressions

ok, so i managed to compress the first episode of fringe from 702mb to 189mb. the video quality degraded too much. so did the audio. hey, i'm new at this, give me a chance.

anyway, i have the following facts:
1. i obviously don't know anything on compressing movies yet.
2. i could probably live without compressing the movies and directly burning them into tv-watchable formats. 4 movies in a dvd is not so bad.
3. for the series though... either i learn more about compressing or get stuck with watching them on laptops/pc desktops.
4. or hey, i could convert them to psp formats and plug it to the tv. (downside: i'd probably burn out the psp during marathons. besides, i got 4G space only)

anyone got any ideas to make me even remotely literate on this field?