What are the best compression tools for MPEG

[slayer4567]

I have almost 300 GB worth of MPEG2 videos stored on my computer (each 1/2 hour is 1 GB roughly). I could put them to a DVD as they are, but 1) I don't have enough DVD's, and 2) I figured why not just compres them. What are some of the best compression tools/formats for an MPEG? There are alot out there and I'm kinda confused on which ones I should go for. I idealy would want one that doesn't show much loss in the picture, but also takes up at least 1/10th of the current size my mpegs take up. It probably would also be benificial if they could play on some set top dvd players. I know that DviX is becoming popular for that, so that is one option. Any suggestions?

[bits]

Forget about compressing, just buy another HD or two. Once you compress there is really no uncompressing without additional quality loss. Hours and hours of encoding can zip down the drown in an instant if the HD fails. HDs are cheap!

[redwudz]

If you really have to compress them, Divx is one choice. You can convert them to a Divx data disk that should play on a standalone Divx DVD player.

Why not try it and see how it looks with one of the videos? Obviously, the more compression, the less quality.

You don't need much more than the Divx codec. It does the work, not the program that uses it. I use VirtualDub Mod most of the time for MPEG to Divx conversion. Or if you want a easy program, try FairUse Wizard.

[Faustus]

Tough call. If you want to avoid compression perhaps you should look into a Tape drive? That is assuming you don't have to access the data that often.

[whitejremiah]

x.264 would be another way to go, however the playback on the videos will then become rather CPU intensive, so im not sure if that's really all that appealing to you or not......if not that, then xvid or divx would be the next best choices....according to what you said, you're running around 2gb per hour of video...that being said, i can use divx to compress approx. 6 hours of video onto one dvdr retaining pretty darn close to the original input quality....going that route, you should be able to archive it all to dvdr in divx format using around 25-30dvdr's in total (provided you're not speaking of something that is VERY high motion.......most any video codec you choose will stumble a bit more on that type of material)

[bits]

slayer4567,

A minor point but it should be made and that is that 'compression' is really not a good word for describing video file size reduction. Reducing a video file size is not like zipping data, when unzipped all of the original data in its original form is still there. When you resize (decrease) a video file it is being re-encoded and data is discarded and altered, you can no longer go back to exactly where you started.

[kschang]

bits is correct. The technical term is lossy compression vs. lossless compression. Lossy compression loses data, and the reconstructed data is less than the original. Lossless compression, on the other hand, when reconstructed, is exactly like the original. However, it is much slower.

Video compression are mostly lossy. There's a few lossless codecs out there, but they take up MUCH more space, they won't be mentioned since you're looking for file size reduction, not expansion.

So think about your requirements. It may be better to buy a few more DVD blanks and archive them, than try to spend hours trying to fit them onto a single blank and end up losing quality that you may need later. But then, only you would know if that's worth it or not.

[slayer4567]

Thanks for all the input. What I'm going to do is skip the lossy compression, and just put them to dvd using various other tools I have. One of the biggest downsides currently for myself, is that I have alot of episodes of various anime, but they arent all there in sequence. So when trying to make a DVD, its almost always better to have the sequence of the videos in order. Plus, all my videos are of 480x 480 resolution (well most..) and I just started putting them to 352x480 (a much more dvd compliant resolution), so those that are 480x480 I'll have to convert to 352x480. I guess in all, I'm going to have to spend a crap load of time, but in the end, for the video quality, it will be worth it. Thanks again for all your posts!