What is the best method for saving thousands of jpegs that differ very
little from each other as a movie to take advantage of the fact that
there is little change from one frame to the next?  I will then need
to convert the movie back to the original jpegs with little or no loss
of quality.  I would like references to software that can
do this and a brief discription of the best movie formats for this
task.  There will be no audio and there doesn't need to be much time
for each frame, I don't plan on looking at it as a movie.  For
example, 30 fps could be 30 jpegs.

Do you want to convert to a movie so you can see them, or just for
storage?  If it's just for storage purposes, create a file archive
using winzip:

http://www.winzip.com

Hi welday007-ga,

   I am not sure if you will have any benefit in saving it as a movie for
the following reasons:
i)What you see as an almost similar image may not be really similar, in which
case the compression that you get may not be worth it.
ii)Also for a good compression, there should be sufficient repetition between
frames,especially when you are using an already compressed format such as jpeg.
You could still go ahead and try using some othe NLE(NonLinearEditing) video 
editing software, that saves it as MJPEG(motion jpeg).  A better soultion is
to use a backup software that has revision control, and efficient compression
of binary data.

Regads
ldavinci-ga

* You don't say what size the jpegs are.  If they are standard video
size, then I think programs that can create mpeg2 files (eg. for dvd)
would work.  Or you could convert them to video size then convert them
to mpeg2 - but that would loose a lot of quality if you wanted to
later convert them back to jpeg at the original image size.

* As one of the commenters suggested, you could put them into a zip
file.  But that would only give a little bit of compression, as jpegs
are
already (usually) compressed.  

* From one of your other questions, I assume you have Visual Basic,
and a program to convert from bmp to jpeg etc from within Visual
Basic.
If so, maybe it would be possible to do this within Visual Basic
(though it may be slow to run with thousands of jpegs).

eg. write a vb program to load each image in turn, compare sections of
each image in turn (a bit like macroblocks in mpeg2), and if it's
identical (or very similar) you could just write to the output file
'use the block from the previous frame', etc.

* You could also save them all to 24 bit bmp, read them and write a
program that takes advantage of the fact that jpegs taken with a
digital camera should change very little from pixel to pixel.  eg. zip
format looks for repetition on a byte by byte basis, but with a 24 bit
bitmap (from a camera), every 3 bytes (RGB) should be vey similar, so
you should be able with this method to get better compression than
using zip format.

I seriously doubt converting to a movie is going to result in any
significant space savings.  I suggested zip because sticking them all
in one zip makes them a bit more portable, and may reduce slack space.