OK to leave files in AVI format for viewing from disk?

9th Sep 2003 03:22 #1

Member

I ask this question for two reasons. First of all, does anyone think that watching a video file by playing it in your cd-rom or dvd-rom player will actually put more strain on the drive if the file you are watching is still in the original captured AVI file? The reason I ask is because it seems the drive does spin harder when watching an AVI file off of a cd-rom rather than watching a converted SVCD, at least when I tried it but I'm not sure.

Second.
I have several videotapes of my college class lectures which are almost all of just the professor giving the lecture with him having a few visual displays. Therefore I thought that in the process of transferring these tapes to either cd or dvd-rom, how about I capture the lectures in both the lowest resolution possible (160x120) as well as a very low frame rate (i.e. 2 to 10 fps). Well I did it, and it's great! At 2 fps I got 49 minutes of lecture into a 178mb AVI file!!! The problem is, when I converted the AVI file into a VCD using TMPGEnc, the file size actually increased alot!!

Therefore, I just thought, how about I leave the original file in AVI, burn them onto a CD-R as a data disk and play them back that way? My question is, if a person watches AVI or any video files from a data disk as opposed to a video disk, does this put extra strain on the cd/dvd player? If so, is it because the player has to work extra hard to decode the video in order to present it, where as a prepared VCD allows the player to do less work during presentation? Any help or direct knowledge appreciated because like I said, the AVI file is actually smaller than the mpeg2 VCD files(!!) but at the same time I don't want to do something damaging.