Can a QT file get as small as a WMV?

[Antoniola]

I've been getting amazing file size reduction using Flip4Mac to create WMV's, but someone said I might be able to do the same with certain settings in Quicktime, to end up with a .mov. The last one I did started out as a 160MB .mov, and became about a 6MB WMV, with no significant loss in quality.

[Baldrick]

what video codec are you using? if you use h264 you should get same quality as wmv.

[terryj]

yes, for QT .mov's , file reduction is all in the Codec you choose.
You choose Animation or Motion Jpeg-A, you get high file sizes
at great quality. You use 3ivx D4.5 or h.264, you can adjust
to get small size/ good to great quality.

[tomlee59]

I've been getting amazing file size reduction using Flip4Mac to create WMV's, but someone said I might be able to do the same with certain settings in Quicktime, to end up with a .mov. The last one I did started out as a 160MB .mov, and became about a 6MB WMV, with no significant loss in quality.

Yeah, the question isn't really "can X be as small as Y." You can make anything very small; it's all a matter of quality for a given file size. And for that, h264 today is arguably the "best" in terms of quality per file size. QT containers happily accommodate h264. XviD is also pretty good (and far less complex, mathematically speaking, so it encodes much faster, and takes fewer mips to decode).

Going from 160MB to 6MB may or may not be miraculous; it depends on what format that 160MB was in to begin with. If it was uncompressed, or only lightly compressed, that level of filesize reduction is entirely ordinary. Think about audio CD crunching down to mp3 by more than a factor of 10 with only minor quality degradation. Same basic concept.

[Antoniola]

Thanks for all the info. That really helps me understand a few things about compression, quality and file size. Seems like h264 is the choice codec. For web compatibility, however, I'm under the assumption that WMV is what all those PC users prefer, since there aren't many who have Quicktime.

[zoobie]

since windows is #1, I chose compatiblilty with wmv
you may want to look at flv also with high compatibility

[rumplestiltskin]

For web, use flv as both Macs and PCs have readily available, stable, high-performance decoders from Adobe.