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Video Compression Question

post #1 of 5
8/28/07 at 12:41pm
Thread Starter 
If I need to compress a video to a specific completed file size, what is the best way to do it?

So far, I have tried various WMV formats with results that are acceptable, but just a little bit too big, or way below the limit and really crappy. There's nto a lot of flexibility in the standard MV encoder that I am using, as it allows you to pick from "profiles" that have certain features.

I'm open to pretty much any common format, such as Divx, Xvid, or Quicktime. I'm not interested in Real Media (is anyone any more?).

Suggestions?
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post #2 of 5
8/28/07 at 1:22pm

Re: Video Compression Question

I recommend H.264: it's a standard, and being widely adopted. iPods, AppleTV, Flash, hardware acceleration from NVidia/ATI, etc. (There are some specific limits to get content to play in certain places.)

With anything besides the simplest encoders, you can use variable-bit-rate encoding, with both a peak and average bitrate. You can do the math to set the average (slightly under target if you want to minimize the chance you'll go just over -- don't forget the bitrate of the audio). Hopefully the encoder works as advertised. Some might even support two-pass encoding, which should help.

Unfortunately, I have no specific recommendation on encoders.
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post #3 of 5
8/28/07 at 1:57pm

Re: Video Compression Question

I have been happy using DiVX. I take a lot of my 640x480 30fps AVI home movies from my digital "still" camera and convert them to DiVX. I can then store them on my media server.

I started using the DiVX converter http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/converter/
Once installed, click on "view list" and then you can select the video and modify the bit rate. You have total control over the file size. I am pretty sure (I am at work now) the same screen has a option to constrain the size of the file to whatever you want and the bit rate will be adjusted to keep the file size to your maximum. The converter is nice because it is very simple... you can drag a bunch of files into it and have it convert them all at once. However, Dr. Divx http://labs.divx.com/DrDivX is totally free (no trial like the converter) and seems to do everything the converter does plus more. It is not as simple, but allows a lot of configuring.

Matt
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post #4 of 5
8/30/07 at 11:13am

Re: Video Compression Question

Koepi's Xvid codec is pretty damn good as far as I can tell. I use VirtualDub as a front end for it.
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post #5 of 5
8/30/07 at 6:58pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Video Compression Question

Thanks for the help. I did not realize I could tweak the Divx settings so much. The video is VERY fast motion. Specifically, it is an hour of handlebar-shot video from my motorcycle, sped up 1500%. Full DVD-quality versions are huge. I had to shrink it down to a mobile-phone sized resolution and compress the audio to 32kbps for it to look like something other than digital mush, keep the audio passable, and keep the 6MB file size limit.
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