Best Style of Compression?

[slayer4567]

Hey,

I quite a few mpeg2 files that I have captured from my TV tuner, and they are taking up quite a bit of space. I would like to keep them on my drives as these are videos i don't want to make a dvd out of. I can shrink them down to about half their size, without making much of a difference by using Divx. But they are still too big as I have a ftp server on this computer and allow a few of my friends to download the files from me. Even after compressing them to half their size, a 15 minute video is still 311 MB. To download that takes quite some time.

I have seen some videos on the net that are about 30 seconds long and are 2MB in size, but the quality of them are great. I've also seen full dvd's online compressed to 700Mb, and these are ones you pay to rent, so I would assume they are good quality (I actually haven't watched them yet). I'm sure both of them use different types of compression, but I have no idea what type of compression they use, but thats the kind I would love to have.

Does anyone have any idea what type of codec or program would do that type of compression?? Maybe Divx can do it, I'm just not well versed enough to get it to look as good... Any tips or hints?

[Scorpion King]

15 minute video and 311MB according to my bitrate calculator is around 2750Kbps w/128Kbps audio. Those 2 hour movies on a 700MB CD-R is around 644Kbps video bitrate w/128Kbps audio.

I think it's pretty normal to resize to a smaller framesize then encode to divx. If your files are like 720x480 then you are going to need more bitrate than say if they were 576x384 to retain quailty. Also, converting a DVD movie (very high quality video) to divx requires less bitrate than say converting a captured tv show to divx because of the difference in the quality of the original video (your captured file). The captured video will almost always require more bitrate to retain the quality.

My advice? Since you say you don't know much about divx then I suggest you install Dr.Divx. The program has a place to enter desired finished filesize and the rest of the resize and conversion process is pretty much automatic and the program does a good job...

Good luck.