videos filling up my HD

[gusl]

My HD is getting full due to my recent videomania. The files are in AVI, and take up about 100MB/minute. I suspect that the compression could be better. Is it easy to convert to a more compact format?

Also, is there a non-publically viewable version of YouTube?

Also, any recommendations for lightweight video editing software?

Comments

[lordspaz.livejournal.com]

100MB/minute??? Holy crap, you should compress that.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

to what format? how?

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

AVI is a container format, it is agnostic of any compression type. Thus you can take an AVI with uncompressed data and produce another AVI using whatever codec you wish - or an MPG or whatever.

It's been years since I messed about with video but if your're using windoze you should take a look at virtualDUB (http://www.virtualdub.org/). It's free open source and once you decide on a codec you can set up a bacth job to process all those AVI files. If memory serves VirtualDUB just lists all of the available codecs installed on your PC, as standard there are probably some standard microsoft and/or intel ones on there.

As for which codec to use, take a look down the list at Video Codec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codec) if this is just touristy footage your probably don't mind a lossy format such as xvid (free and open source!). You should be able to see a settings page for the codec from virtualDUB, if you have a slow PC and/or are unwilling to leave it processing files for hours/days on end then you will probably want to look up which settings will allow you to do a light/fast compression.

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

Just tried the latest stable xvid codec in virtualdub

xvid code 1.13 (http://www.xvid.org/Downloads.15.0.html)

With the default 'high quality' settings it compressed a 3.5GB raw AVI to 11.8MB.

Alternatively you might want to go for a lossless codec so you get the chance of recompressing with some prefered codec later on without any loss of quality - it's generally a bad idea to put video through more than one lossy codec. OTOH if you want to just store the vids for later processing you could just run them through a standard compressor, I like 7zip (www.7zip.org), you might get something like 20-45% compression ratio.