Help me compress my home movies to cd please

[rruwalton]

I have camcorder 8mm tapes galore of home family movies and would love to put them onto cd.

I am able to capture the video from my camcorder via my hauppage win tv card but find that a minute or so of video uses 500mb or so of space.

I really want to put the video onto cd and have half decent quality. I know I need to compress the video but where do I start.

Can someone help me please with the best software / method to accomplish such a task.

Thank you

Richard

[Tommyknocker]

Use the freeware Virtual Dub to capture your video. When you capture, use a compression codec called Huffyuv or DivX. Once you do that, you can read up on converting to a CD format called VCD or SVCD to store and play your movies on. Read the Beginner's guides as well, it would have answered this quesion and others for you if had. Keep at it, you are closer than you realize .

[jjbreen]

I agree with Tommyknocker about VirtualDub and the Huffyuv codec, if hard disk space isn't an issue. From my rudimentary knowledge capturing at VCD resolution (352x288 PAL, or 320x240 NTSC) with Huffyuv and CD quality audio will eat up about 190-200MB per minute of video, taking approximately 11-12Gb for an hour of video. If hard disk space is limited then you'd be better off using an MJPEG compression codec which cuts the file size to about 64MB per minute of video.

As for converting to CD, good old TMPGEnc is hard to beat as a free but slowish MPEG-1 encoder which will give you Video-CD compliant MPEG files.

If like me you are occasionally very lazy, invest in a copy of WinDVR 3 from Intervideo. It's a realtime MPEG encoder and captures directly into either VCD, SVCD or DVD compliant MPEG files, though you sacrifice quality

[rruwalton]

Thanks guys. I tried the Virtual Dub program and found that I got best results using a dixv 5.0.5 codec. This allowed me the best quality with around 13.5mb per 50sec clip (just testing at the moment). Wicked compression rate.

I found that the huffy used too much space, and picvideo was not as good as divx.

Many thank again.