compressing a meg and avi file

[slimpickins]

hi, i have quite a few 350meg video files, most are avi but some are mpeg4, anyway, they take up atlot of room on my harddrive and i'd like to compress them to save space, i have used the winrar zip compress and then the icon changes to the multicoloured books staked on the side, but they are still taking up the same amount of space even though supposedly compressed, can anyone help please

thanks

[slimpickins]

scratch that, they have compressed by about 1% but thats a joke

[Ai Haibara]

Your video files are already compressed, so there really isn't anything left in the files for archivers like ZIP and RAR to compress. The only way you can compress the videos further is to lower their bitrate, which will - in turn - degrade the quality of the videos.

[ZippyP.]

To compress you must re-encode, zipping won't work. Re-encoding with more compession means quality loss, and a lot of time and effort.

[slimpickins]

after usingwinzip 10 i have compressed a file to 406kb using ppmd, the ratio is 99% and when i uncompress i have te same 350meg file, can someone confirm this information

[slimpickins]

unbelievable,i can compress a 350meg file to less than half a meg, wow, i can convert 60 gig of files to 63 megabytes, thats like converting it to 00.1%

[Ai Haibara]

Sure, using archivers like RAR and ZIP, it is definitely possible to make archives like that. But not if you use compressed video or audio files as the source.

For example, if you were to (somehow ^_^) create a 300GB text file with nothing but the letter A in every position, that'd probably compress to somewhere around 1-3K.