AVI compression

[MrMagooba]

Would you of the wise please advise me as to what brogram would be best to reduce the size on an AVI from 1.4GB to 700MB (basically 2cd's to 1cd).

I'd prefere it if I could set the file size required and let it rip to produce the best quality for that size but I get the feeling it isn't that easy.

I've tried converting it with VirtualDub, but the end results always seem blocky (much worse than avi files that were converted to 700MB originally).

Thanks.
MrMagooba

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hi and welcome to the Doom9 forum MrMagooba,

Can you tell us a little more about your AVI?

Is it DivX, XviD etc

What is the image pixel frame size of your .avi

What is the aspect ratio of the picture of your .ai (1.77:1, 1.85:1, 2.35:1 etc)?

What is the run time of our .avi

Tht said there are no tools that will simply shrink the bitrate of your encode. So it will have to be re-encoded which will introduce artifacts. However, once we know a little more about the source we may be able to help you.

Cheers

[MrMagooba]

According to GSpot v2.21:

Video Codec - DivX 3 Low-Motion
Audio Codec - AC3
Runtime - 02:11:06
Frame Size - 640x272 (2.35:1) [=40:17]
Bitrate - 1104 kb/s
Running at - 25 FPS

I would also like some general information as to how to best reduce the size of AVI (DivX and XviD) files to fit on 1CD. (Bought myself a DVD player with XviD and DivX 3.11, 4 & 5 compatabilities, and would like to put the movies on 1CD instead of 2 SVCD's , as I used to do - using DVD2SVCD)

Thanks..

[jggimi]

You mentioned AC3 audio, which usually has a high bitrate (up to 448kbps for DD 5.1ch). I thought I'd check to see if re-encoding the audio alone would get you to a single CD. Nope.

With a length of 2:11:06 and SBC video bitrate of 1104kbps, the total size would be right around 1371MB if the ac3 track were 320kbps. That include 11MB of .avi overhead for a single .ac3 track of that length.

Remove the audio track entirely, and your video would still be 1066MB -- 1060MB of video, 6MB of .avi overhead. To fit it on a single CD would require re-encoding.

You will not like the results going from backup to backup. As you mentioned already, the quality will only be degraded by this activity. I recommend returning to the source DVDs, or learning to switch discs.

But if you insist, I would recommend using the GordianKnot encoding suite, as it can accept .avi sources.

I would use VirtualDubMod to concatenate the two parts, demux the audio track, and create an .avi without soundtrack for input to GKnot. I don't know your skill level, if you're new to this you'll find that parts of Doom9's DivX guides helpful for using GKnot, and you'll find parts of his Format Conversion guides helpful for joining multiple .avi files. You may have difficulty joining the avi's with soundtracks; if so, you can circumvent that either by working with the video and sound separately, or by converting sound to .wav format and using AviSynth scripting to sync video and sound. You would have to be comfortable with AviSynth scripting and frameserving to perform this latter operation.