Why is this filesize so small?

[SmokeMeAKipper]

Hello all,

This might be a stupid question, but I'm quite new to all this.

I was about to download my first movie(******.2002.Xvid.DVL.sharereactor.avi) but I see that the filesize is only 700 ish megs, whereas most other movies come in two parts of 700mb each. Does this mean the quality will be terrible or is it like super compressed?

[Sefy]

It all depends on the Quality of the movie, and also on the Length of playback and not to forget who was the person who encoded it, i've seen alot of 500+ movies that were pretty good in quality, although I prefer doing the movies myself and not downloading them.

[HeatoN]

No it could be very high quality. Is your file an .avi? then its DivX which is awesome quality. Most 1:30movies are 720MB. Like Lord of the Rings which is 3hrs long. It is 2 700MB files. Get it? Some movies come in as 3 800MB files, thats because most of the time they are SVCD (MPEG-2). So you are able to play SVCD's on dvd players, which Avi's you cant.

[SmokeMeAKipper]

I think I get it.

The movies I've seen that come as two parts (700ish meg each) are not compressed, but ready to be burnt straight to C.D

Is that right? I did say I was new to this

[0 kewl]

No - that's not right. I'd assume that most movies would come around 700 MB big so that it can be burned onto a CDR/RW. If the movie is in DivX (AVI) format then 2 part (2 files 700 MB each) movie will have a better quality than a whole movie 700 MB big (given both movies are of the same legth and encoded with the same codec) since the 2 part movie is less compressed. I'd assume some people encode the same movie so that it fits on 1 CD some so that it fits on 2 CDs. Therefore, the 2 part movies do not necessarily come in a format ready to be burned as (S)VCD, although they can certainly be burned as a data CD (but it won't play in DVD player). If you need to know whether it can be burned straight away as (S)VCD then check the file extension (must be *.mpeg) and load the file into TMPGEnc - it will show you at the bottom whether it is Mpeg1 (VCD) or Mpeg2 (SVCD). Even then it might not play in your DVD player since the MPEG file you downloaded might be a X(S)VCD (non-standard (S)VCD) which isn't supported by many players. In any way, all files will be compressed (whether AVI or MPEG) and ready to burn as DATA CD.

I hope this makes sense.


Regards.

[SmokeMeAKipper]

It does make sense. Thanks for taking the time to explain so well.