After further researching open-source projects and tools that are available to me, I have decided that I will instead focus on ffmpeg.  It is similar to Xvid in the sense that it is an open-source project that provides codecs for compressing and decompression data, but it has better documentation and seems easier to work with.

I have also attained several sample files and have begun experimenting with how well ffmpeg compresses them.  In order to test their compression algorithms as best as possible, I have many different types of videos for performing testing on.  One video is a black screen, and it compresses quite nicely, which makes since given that there is little randomness is the video.  Another video, which involves confetti falling, compresses poorly, since the video is much less predictable.  I plan to continue to experiment to see what ffmpeg excels at and struggles with, and I will study and evaluate its source code.