So many Video Codecs to comprehend; best Video compression?

[bulava]

Hi All,


I am little confused and caught between many codecs


Goal: to compress one 1.36 GB AVI file to 800-900 MB AVI file which must work on PC and DVD player (to watch on TV)
Plan of action: use a FREE tool to do the task.

Result: WinFF 0.45 crashed. DVDVideoSoft free tools didn't help. Latest Handbrake version triggered an exception and died. Now am working with FormatFactory latest version but it can't able to reduce the size

Someone told me to try Mediacoder. Should I try it

I think am not able to grasp on compression basics to use the right codec for this task. I don't know how to proceed from here to reach my goal. Here is the AVI 1.36GB codec info as read from the VLC player:


Video: 656x400, Frame rate is 23.97, Xvid
Audio: a52, 48000 Hz, bit rate is 256 kb/s


Please suggest a way out to reach my goal


thanks,

bulava

[manono]

Goal: to compress one 1.36 GB AVI file to 800-900 MB AVI file which must work on PC and DVD player (to watch on TV)

Does your DVD player also play AVIs? If yes, this shouldn't be all that hard. Why not just open it in AutoGK and choose whatever size you want and let it go to work on it?

Audio: a52, 48000 Hz, bit rate is 256 kb/s

What's a52 audio? Do you mean to say AC3?

You might post a GSpot picture of what it says about the AVI so we can see if there's anything peculiar about it.

[bulava]

Does your DVD player also play AVIs? If yes, this shouldn't be all that hard. Why not just open it in AutoGK and choose whatever size you want and let it go to work on it?

My DVD player does play AVI files, did watch many movies connecting the same to a TV. Do you recommend AutoGK? I am not able to get the desired size of 900MB with FormatFactory too. I think it's my lack of understanding (tweaking) on how to do this job

What's a52 audio? Do you mean to say AC3?

Yes, that's what it shows in the VLC player. I don't know a52 means AC3 or not...sorry

[bulava]

You might post a GSpot picture of what it says about the AVI so we can see if there's anything peculiar about it.

That was a very handy tool, thanks for sharing.

Yes, it shows as (Dolby AC3) AC3, 48000Hz 256 kb/s tot , stereo (2/0).

And, File Length Correct:


OpenDML (AVI v2.0)
Interleave: 96 ms (2.3 v.frames), preload=96
Audio frames: Split across interleaves
Video: 1.17 GB (85.64%)
Audio: 196 MB (14.00%)
AVI Overhead: 5.06 MB (0.36%)

[ISFT] VirtualDubMod 1.5.4.1 (build 2178/release)
[IAS1] English
[JUNK] VirtualDubMod build 2178/release
[USER] XviD0047


I guess the source 1.36 GB file was compressed with AutoGK, am using that same tool now which has VirtualDubMod. I did choose 900MB as custom target file. Hope everything goes well.

[mh2360]

AVI Recomp will do a similar job to AutoGK, with a simpler interface. Just give it an output file size and it will do a 2 pass (standalone friendly) recode of an AVI without touching the audio. Output file sizes are usually pretty accurate.

[KBeee]

I'm a little puzzled why you need to reduce the size from 1360MB to 900MB.

[bulava]

AVI Recomp will do a similar job to AutoGK

Thanks for sharing, downloaded that tool and I shall definitely try it out soon.

I'm a little puzzled why you need to reduce the size from 1360MB to 900MB.

I have couple of such files awaiting for DVD burning. Such large files have become almost regular issue, eating too much DVD space and also lot of free space! Say, 400-500MB of free space on each DVD.

Anyway, I did reach my goal This time I did try out with Mediacoder development release - 0.6.2.4275

I did choose these settings manually by doing few experiments:

Video: XviD, 1000 Kbps
Audio: LAME MP3, 128 Kbps, 44100 Hz
Time taken: over 5 hours (on this Pentium III 1.2 GHz Tualatin test machine).

AVI File Size: 872 MB


Could you guys appraise me whether I did this job rightly or not? Where could I improve? Please let me know. And the transcoded file is playing perfectly with VLC player

[KBeee]

The time sounds about right for such a low powered computer, but I'm not familiar with Mediacoder so I couldn't comment on anything else.
The main thing is if you're happy with the results then nothing else really matters. After all you're the person watching it