compressing xvid files

[bloodyrectum]

i have two xvid files that are about 700mb each. i would like to join them into one file, and then burn that to a disc. what would be the best way to reduce the file size of the joined movie from 1.4gb to about 700mb? can i recompress it with nandub? thanks in advance.

[frodoontop]

Just don't. CD's are that cheap you don't need this really. To compress the xvid another time will ONLY get you bad results.

[Prettz]

Like he said, if you do this there is absolutely no way, not even theoretically, that your results will not look utterly horrible.

[Imperial Llama]

Use virtualdubmod to recompress the video. You will probably need to reduce the resolution for your final movie and re-encode the sound at 128kbps or less in order to have any chance of achieving acceptable quality.

[Teegedeck]

yuck

[sysKin]

Oh come on people, it's not going to be *that* bad. I mean, 2cd movies are usually high quality - much higher than 1cd will have anyway, from whatever source.

So, if you *have to* do that, I suggest to resize (not to reduce resolution, but to make new macroblocks not aligned with old ones). Reduce resolution by something like 32 pixels horizontally and 16 vertically. Before resize, you should also crop 2 pixels from each edge - to reduce the ugly effects near edges which would make compression even more difficult.

If the source video has artifacts, you might start with "post-processing" it by using directshowsource() and ffdshow.

Have fun,
Radek

[Manao]

I totally agree with sysKin. Sometimes, people just encode on two CDs because the film is two hours long, even if it's very compressible. In that case, you almost have the DVD quality as input ( plus the AC3 sound ), so why not recompress with a little resizing and filtering ( at least deblocking ) ? And changing CD's during a movie is bothering.

[cult]

why changing cd's?Put one cd in your dvdplayer and the 2nd in your cdrw.Or even better copy the two files in your hdd an play them with a play list.You wont even notice the change

[bloodyrectum]

thanks everyone, for the variety of advice and opinion.

[three_dee]

I've done some 'repacks' mainly for the same reasons that Manao mentions - ei. a 84min romantic lowmotion movie with 448kbps AC3 on 2 CDs is overkill no matter how you twist and turn it. It looked just fine slightly downsampled, with ogg@96kbps sound and burned as an 800mb m2f2. Ofcourse there was a difference, but it was, in this case, insignifigant - could be the scenario for you, too.