AVI's not all the same

[johnnymoses]

I found an AVI file on the net that was a DVD Rip. It's a 99 minute movie & is only 712 Megs. It has less artifacts than rips that I have done when I produce mpg's & it is smaller. (I just produced an mpg from a 115 minute DVD & it was 1.2 Gigs)

Three questions:
1. Is it possible to burn that 712 meg AVI file in VCD format without losing a great deal of quality? (right now it only plays on my computer and would like to play it in my stand-alone Sony.) Would you convert it first to mpg?

2. Do you have any idea how to find out what method was used to rip this 712 Meg AVI from DVD?

3. I have a 200 meg clip of my son playing baseball and it only lasts about a minute and a half. I produced it from a DV Camcorder. Why is the quality of this video so crappy compared to the DVD rip that I referred to above and yet the file size if almost 1/3 the size for less than 2 minutes?

Thanks, Johnny

[potatosalad]

1. A VCD is just like a VHS tape, so if you want to lose that extra touch of quality, burn a VCD. However, a SVCD is much better quality (kinda between DVD and VHS) which is how I burn most of my movies.

2. The reason that the 712 MB movie was smaller was the screen-size and the codec used. Use VirtualDub or some similar program to change the codec by re-encoding it with DivX 6.02, DivX Low-Motion, or DivX High-Motion. To find out what codec the 712 MB movie is using, open it with VirtualDub and click File > File Information... which should tell you anything you need to know. Oh, if you want the file to be really, really small with a slight loss of quality, use the MPEG-4 Codecs which can make 21 minutes around 50 MB, give or take a few.

3. DV is like Raw video, so the file will be bigger. The DVD rip is probably an AVI with little or no codec, but it still is somewhat compressed. The quality depends on how many MegaPixels the DV Camcorder takes. Anything below 1.3 is probably not going to suit the "perfect quality" that resides in all of us. You also may have lost some quality in the transfer from your camcorder to your computer through whatever port you used. (It's happened to me before)

Hope this helps.

[MaDmiZe]

Just me....but my rule of thumb is...if its an AVI off the net it should be at least 600 to 700mb to make a descent VCD.....I've done several of these in the 715- 760mb range and they are better than most tapes I have. If the source AVI is small and looks bad when you watch it...then the resulting mpg file for your VCD will be bad quality also.

Yes if you want to watch on stand alone ....you need to convert to mpg.