M4V vs. AVI

[mkr10001]

OK, so ive been converting some AVIs to make them smaller, ive just been lowering the bit rate from 1000 to about 750 and they end up about 260mb. these are 40 minute long tv shows.

i ripped a dvd yesterday to put on my ipod, (m4v) it was the pilot of a tv show and was 1hr15 and i used a constant quality option to encode it and it ended up with an average bit rate of about 659.

but its 441mb

now its only 35mins longer than the other tv shows but its so much bigger

does the container make a difference to the file size?

edit: ok ive just looked at the codec info in VLC and for some reason it decided NOT to use h.264 when i ripped the dvd, not sure why but i told it to.

ill redo it in h.264 and see what it says then

[creamyhorror]

Err...if a 260mb file is 40min, then you'd expect a 75min file with the same bitrate to be 488mb. 260/40 * 75 = 488. Simple math. The codec chosen is irrelevant.

[mkr10001]

ah yes, sorry, i got confused, the sample i made had a bitrate of only 300 ish then i checked the one for this then edited this post withouth thinking. cheers

[Baldrick]

Not so much bigger? It's almost twice as big(40minutes + 35 minutes...) so it should be about twice as big in file size.

The container will make a difference to the file size because of different overhead but not that much. (see http://www.alexander-noe.com/video/amg/en_overhead_comparison.html )

[mkr10001]

also part of my beef now is that handbrake didn't use h.254 when i told it to.

[Baldrick]

What did it use then? Identify using mediainfo.

[mkr10001]

It used AVC

[Baldrick]

H.264 = avc. .

[mkr10001]

really?

because the ones i've encoded using xmedia recode actually say h264 on them

this codec lark is confusing lol

thanks for your help

[yoda313]

Use avicodec or gspot to open the file in question. It will tell you for sure what the video codec is.

[mkr10001]

yeah it is avc1 but thats fine if that h264 anyway.