Reducing File Sizes?

[GHUA]

Okay, so here is some background information. I just moved into a new home. I bought my first big screen television. A 53" Toshiba HDTV, on sale for $2700 Canadian Dollars. It is amazing. I also bought a Toshiba DVD player to go with it.

Now, I'm quite the computer nerd, but I have never really done any work with video editing. I've mostly dealt in the hardware/overclocking aspect of computers.

Right now I am running;

AMD XP1700+ (1466MHz) @ 1650MHz
GIGABYTE GA-7VTXH+ (KT266A)
SEAGATE 60GB 7200 RPM HDD
512MB PC2100 (266MHz) DDR RAM
SOUND BLASTER LIVE 5.1
D-LINK DFE 530 TX
ATI RADEON 7200/VE 64MB SDR
52X Lite-On CD-ROM
16X NEC CD/RW


So, when I got my DVD player and big screen TV, it was only natural (or so I feel) that I would want to start watching movies on it, rather than my 19" monitor.

The only problem is that ALL my movies are DivX. So I started poking around this website, and came up with a way to convert my DivX films into playable films on my DVD player.

My Toshiba DVD player only has support for VCD. And I found that converting from DivX to VCD, I lost about 50% of my quality. I found that very unnaceptable. Therefore, I converted to S-VCD with TMPGENC, then I used the MPEG TOOLS section to re-write the file header as VCD2.0, rather than SVCD file header, and my DVD player could not tell the difference, the movies worked fine, and I found that the quality of my movie actually INCREASED by about 10-15%

So now you may be wondering what my problem is? Well, when I convert from DivX (approx. 700MB) to SVCD, I end up with a file that is approx. 2.0GB.

In order to burn the movie, it requires 3 CD's, instead of 1 CD, when it was still a DivX file...

My question is, are there any ways to significantly reduce the size of a file without losing much quality? Even if I could reduce the file by 400MB or so... to 1.6GB, then I could fit the movie on 2 CD's instead of 3...


Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide me...

-rob

[Truman]

http://forum.vcdhelp.com/search.php

http://www.vcdhelp.com/calc.htm

btw, nice system...

[GHUA]

Okay, I must apologize, I don't know what to do with that search link. And I understand the bitrate calculator completely... I'm just not sure which program I can use to set my own bit rates? All I have used so far is TMPGENC, I'm not very familiar with it either.

If you would please help a little more, or direct link me to another thread in which this topic has already been discussed, it would be greatly appreciated...

-rob

[Truman]

I guess your steps are the following:
load video and audio source
load template

Then press the LOAD button once again and load the unlock.mcf (templates\extra subdir). Then you can change the bitrate. Note that you can calculate the filesize only when you use CBR or 2pass VBR. Only the average resp. the constant bitrate effects the filesize.

There is IMHO no way to significantly reduce the size of a file without losing much quality. But quality is very subjective and depends on the source as well.

[Akai Rounin]

Alternative Realities...

ATI has so many different cards now it's hard to keep up... BUT, doesn't that one have VIDEO OUT, or is it not a Dual Display version? Couldn't you just play your DivX on the PC's CD-ROM and send the audio/video to the big screen via lengthy cables or RF transmitter? That way you wouldn't have to bother with VCD or burning extra discs for MPG2. Of course, then you wouldn't have that handy remote for pause, fast forward, rewind, chapter jump, etc.... If you have an older, smaller PC with Video OUT capability, you could just park that next to or behind your big screen, then either use it as a file server for video or as a dumb terminal when playing video from your main machine over a home network. The bottom line is that you can't put eight gallons of water in a one gallon bucket all at once without getting the floor wet. Still, if the 700 MB DivX file is acceptable to you, there should be a way to tweak settings to get a 700 MB MPEG2 video you would enjoy just as much.

Unta Glebin Gloutin Globin,

Akai Rounin, The Cyber Sage

[GHUA]

Yeah. I've got 4 comps here with TV out, and I am sick and tired of moving them up to the room with the big screen. I hate running RCA cable and S-Video cable too... It's okay though. With the bitrate calculator I was linked to, I've learned how to change the bitrate of the video to make sure that my DivX's (once converted) will be small enough to fit on 2 CD's... I just hated having to use 3 CD's for every movie... 2 is normal/acceptable...

Thanks for the help people.