MPEG-2 and Windows Media are great for real time recording even on slow computers. I don't see much sense using lossless codecs. Even near lossless HUFFYUV and MOTION JPEG usually require a very fast hard drive or even a raid array.

If your computer is powerful enough, you may use an MPEG-4 AVC (h.264) video codec like free x264. MPEG-4 AVC is great because of hardware support in many devices including portable ones. And its quality is very good.

If you create videos for the web, then you may consider less popular VP8 .WebM videos. You may find these HTML5 WebM videos on youtube.

If your computer is not powerful enough, you may use 2-pass encoding:
http://stream-recorder.com/forum/sho...8&postcount=17

Note: It is always a good idea to experiment with different codecs and their settings to find the best codec for your needs.