needing help to make videos smaller in file size

[sylvester243]

I have a JVC video camera MG57, it records directly into Mpeg2 format, hence a 4:17min file is approx 305MB once on the computer...what i'd like to do with the it is make the file small enough to email or put on a web site at some time while still retaining most if not all of the picture quality.....which is the best codec, program, or whatever it is i need to achieve this.

Currently i'm trialing TMPGE 4.0 but cant find the right settings to get the file small enough for email yet...any suggestions would be great thanks

[redwudz]

It's difficult to get MPEG-2 down to smaller sizes without making it unviewable. Two methods come to mind: You can convert to MPEG-1 or maybe better would be WMV. It handles small filesizes without too much quality loss. Those two formats work well on the web.

From there, you can reduce the bitrate with either formats. How much depends on how much quality you want to preserve. For MPEG-1, TMPGEnc does that very well. For WMV, use Windows Movie Maker or Windows Media Encoder.

[Soopafresh]

Check out Winmenc for an easy encoder GUI where you can test out the various codecs for quality. Download the following and unzip all into the same folder:

http://tirnanog.fate.jp/mirror/mplayer/mplayer2007.01.26.7z
http://yawoogle.googlepages.com/winmenc.0.61.zip
ftp://sourceware.org/pub/pthreads-win32/dll-latest/lib/pthreadGC2.dll

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But for the sake of simplicity, Mpeg1 at a high enough bit rate can cut it. Unfortunately, you have to really crank it up. You'll see it easily has the most artifacts as demonstrated below.



source.mpeg1.mpg

source.divx.avi

source.xvid.avi

source.x264.avi

[SpectateSwamp]

Try keeping your video to shorter than 2 minutes.
I simply hit the record button to stop and hit it again
to start. Not too complex.

Then upload them to dropshots.com (very fast)
Have your friends look at them there. I switch
the max of 10 free videos a day.