Compresing 700+mb AVIs to 300mb

[§ÇHMܱZ]

I burn movies i Download on to SVCD so I can watch them on my DVD player. Movies that are split and each half is about 150mb work perfect. any older movie I get is a DVD rip and is over 700mb I was wondering if there is a way to compress it so that it is small enough to change to Mpeg2 and still fit on the SVCD. I belive that 300mb AVI's are perfect.

[gll99]

I hope I understand what you are saying correctly.

Sorry but I believe you have some info confused.

The compression ratio and filesize of the original don't have anything to do with your resulting vcd or svcd size. In fact you can usually expect that a larger size avi will be less compressed and therfore a more suitable candidate to make a good (s)vcd. What may be more important is the size of the frame of the original for example is it 704x480 (thinking ntsc here) which you want to make into 480x480 or 352x480 svcd. Also the framerate is it already at the rate you want to put out ie...29.97. Of course the length of the movie will impact on the final size.

The fact that an input avi is 300mb instead of 700mb for the same length clip and the same avi compressor should mean an inferior end product. If different time clips and different avi compressors are involved then your comparing apples and oranges.

[§ÇHMܱZ]

ohhhhhhhh ok so if i cut the 700mb / 120min avi in half and then burn the halfs I'll be ok?

[gll99]

Yes it can fit, but 60 minutes of good quality svcd is pushing it.

I usually only manage 45 min at the quality I expect.

With the small files you may be achieving this because the movie is so compressed that it lost detail. Look at small features, background items and characters you will no doubt notice that they look softer. Without getting technical here, the mpeg encoder does not repeat the data too often if it does not change so it takes less space to store. That's why when you apply a smoother on a video it gets rid of artifacts and noise by blending the pixels to their neighbour so they all look the same. Smoother images and less movement across frames means smaller encoded file.

You will have to test it by adjusting your svcd bitrate. If you are on ntsc and you use 480x480 you could try 352x480 and also lower the audio bitrate if it works for you it will save a bit of space.