Trying to Compress Files To Make Smaller - Pls Help

[cademichaels]

I have about 100 different videos on my hard drive. All of them ranging from ASF to MOV to AVI

What I want to do is compress them all to a format that can be easily Decompressed later (To DVD, VCD or SVCD)

I was thinking of using DIVX or XVID and when I started doing this I started having a problem

One of the following would happen

1- I took a high quality movie and it became Crap
2- I took a low quality movie and it became bigger than the origional

What steps should I take to Copy a Movie from one Format to Another format at the same (or near same) Quality

Cade

[cademichaels]

Oh I should have mentioned. I was using VirtualDub

[gll99]

You probably cannot compress the files any more without further loss of quality especially if you hope to ever use them again as dvd/svcd/vcd. The only exception to that would be very large files using a lossless codec like huffy or slightly compressed picvideo. I doubt that the files you are talking about are compressed with those codecs.

[negon]

well basically asf is already compressed video and chances are the avi files you have, if they're not hundreds of megabytes, are also compressed to divx or some sort of avi codec. As for mov, that's also compressed already...

[cademichaels]

I want to get all my files into the same format though. This is why I was trying to convert them all

Cade