Convert HD to SD ?

[fire_water]

Hi,

I recently took about 25 GB of video with my smart phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket. The phone saved each video file as a:
- MPEG-4 movie
- 1920 × 1080
- AAC, H.264

The videos play fine on my Macbook Pro, which has these specs:
- Mac OS X 10.6.8
- 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5
- 4 GB Memory

I will be sharing the videos with family, however, their computer is much older and cannot handle playback of the videos. They will be watching the videos on a TV via S-Video connection to the laptop. Their computer specs are:

- Dell Latitude D800 laptop
- Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3
- Intel Pentium M 2 GHz
- 1 GB Memory

My questions are:

1.) I will need to convert the HD videos to SD for my family to watch them on their Dell laptop, correct?

2.) Which software should I use for the conversion? Free/Open Source is preferred. Mac compatible required.

3.) What video settings do you recommend for the converted files? I would prefer to retain as much of the original video quality as possible.

Thank you

[TBoneit]

Hi

Why not convert them to a DVD.
If you convert them to a one hour per disc you'll be getting good quality at 720 by 480.

Most computers and homes have a DVD player. The slowest laptop should be able to play a standard DVD.

Good Luck

[jman98]

I'm not knocking TBoneit's suggestion, but if you want to keep more of the HD, you could convert to Divx/Xvid and downscale to 1280x720. You have to have a REALLY old PC, I'm talking like 7+ years here, for even a single core CPU to not be able to successfully play Divx/Xvid files at that resolution. The specs of that laptop should be sufficient for Divx or Xvid playback of 1280x720 video. I do not know what Mac friendly programs you can use for conversion though. Maybe ffmpeg. Don't forget to convert the audio to MP3 if converting to Divx/Xvid to further reduce the load on the CPU.

[Ai Haibara]

Handbrake might work. It outputs to MKV or MP4/M4V video containers, but their computer theoretically shouldn't have a problem with either of those at SD resolutions, as long as they have everything necessary to play the videos installed (like the necessary codecs, splitters and players... or an all-inclusive player like VLC, though I'm not sure about the 2.x versions).

For shareware/commercial software (though both are relatively inexpensive, I believe), and outputting to different formats/codecs, there's ffmpegX ($15) and iffmpeg ($10). There are other choices, of course, but I don't do much video work on my Mac or Linux systems.

[TBoneit]

The only reason I suggested DVD format was that it is for family members. If fire_water knew for sure there were no Apple computers in the mix then .wmv would also be a common to every windows PC format.

[Ai Haibara]

I could be wrong - I don't know how much or how well any of the ffmpeg/mencoder-based software (or VLC, for that matter) support output to Windows Media formats, but it may be difficult to produce Windows Media files on a Mac (without buying the Flip4Mac suite).

[pixel zombie]

I use Aimersoft Total Media Converter to convert HD to standard DVD resolution. I have also used Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate 6 to accomplish the same task.

[fire_water]

I used Hand Brake, free and easy, to convert my HD videos to SD. Here is a link to the thread that describes how to do it:

https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=24247

Thank you for your help