Can I compress avi?

[u06jgg]

I made a 2 disk divx from DVD but want to fit it to 1 disk, can I compress avi file directly without having to start from scatch with the vob files again? If so will one of the G-Knot software bundle do it?

[ultimatebilly]

Hi u06jgg, and welcome to the forum.

You can of course recompress the avi, you just need an encoding application, for example Virtualdub or Virtualdubmod, set the compression in the video-options, and reencode it...
You can use GordianKnot for that, but you have of course already done all necessary steps like resizing, so you wouldn't have to do that again.

But here is the reason why you shouldn't do it, but rather start all over again:
The quality achieved by recompressing an avi will really suck!
You should always use the best source available to encode, and since the 2-CD-avi is already heavily compressed (although you may not see it if the codec did a good job), you will definitively see it when compressing this file again.
Your codec has removed all the redundancy and the irrelevancy from the picture that was possible in respect to achieve the specified filesize for 2 CDs, and if you recompress that now, there won't be enough to remove, so the video-quality will start to suffer very much.
If you encode the DVD again to 1 CD, then it is a totally different thing. The codec can choose which of the irrelevancy (of which there's plenty on good DVDs) it removes in order to achieve a specific compression ratio, and it will optimize the encode for that compression ratio (like the encode before was optimized for 2 CDs)...
So I think you should really take the hassle and encode from the DVD-source again, and I think the vast majority of the forum-members thinks the same...

[Lord of the Discs]

here comes one of those who think the same ...

I re-encoded a divx-file once and never again
(it was blurry and blocky and had all kinds of artifacts)

LotD