zipping and video quality

[keisukey]

i have this about 6 gigs worth of about 20 episodes of a divx-ed tv series, and i want to put it on one dvd. i wanted to stay away from converting it to vcd, since i don't want to lose alot of quality, so i was wondering if i can compress it, but i used winzip and i could only reduce it to 5.8 GB. so is there another zipping or archive-ing program that would compress more than winzip?? or another way of compressing it?? and i was wondering if compressing it would dramatically lose some quality of the video? i know this is kinda stupid, but does anyone have any solutions? thanks.

[dani82]

winrar/winace at best/high compression, it will probably take 3-4x longer than winzip and will only provide at least 2% more of a compression

compressing can't change anything, except the space it takes up on your HD (after you delete the orginal)

you could always cut off the opening and credit of each episode, if it's been done, then use 2 dvds

[akupenguin]

Short answer: no.

If you can compress a divx (or any other video format) at all using general data compressors like zip, then the encoder of the divx did something very wrong. You can squeeze a little bit out of CBR MP3, but it's still not much.

The only way you can make the movies noticably smaller is to fully recompress it with another lossy video codec, and lose lots of quality. Though recompressing to a lower-bitrate MPEG4 is still better than VCD.