How to resize avi without distortion on final output?

[AceRimmer667]

I am recording a website 'in use' as a test, using VirtualVCR and VH Screen Capture along with the divx codec, which works great. My problem is that for two minutes of video, the output is around 80mb. I want to send the output online to the website owner to show them that the site is working on other systems-but as the files are a bit large I am wondering... whats the best way to lessen the file size without losing too much quality?

At the moment, I have tried format factory to simply resize the resolutions of the above recorded videos, although it works great when there is little movement in any recordings, when someone scrolls down a webpage, the videos have alot of tearing/distortion, which the original avis did not have-any tips on how to lessen the video size without this effect? thanks :)

[hello_hello]

Are your original files AVIs?
For converting AVI to AVI, AutoGK is pretty good. If you want a particular file size, just enter your size and leave everything in auto mode (under advanced options) and let AutoGK do it's thing. AutoGK decodes AVIs via DirectShow so you'd need an appropriate system decoder. ffdshow would be a good choice if you don't have it installed.

For converting using the x264 encoder there's lots of choices, I'm partial to MeGUI, but there's RipBot264, FFCoder, VidCoder etc. Each will let you select a file size but none of them automatically adjusts the resolution or resizer being used etc the way AutoGK does to maintain quality, so you'd have to experiment to get the file size down to whatever you're aiming for. x264 should be able to compress the video more than Xvid though.

[AceRimmer667]

I am recording a website 'in use' as a test, using VirtualVCR and VH Screen Capture along with the divx codec, which works great. My problem is that for two minutes of video, the output is around 80mb. I want to send the output online to the website owner to show them that the site is working on other systems-but as the files are a bit large I am wondering... whats the best way to lessen the file size without losing too much quality?

At the moment, I have tried format factory to simply resize the resolutions of the above recorded videos, although it works great when there is little movement in any recordings, when someone scrolls down a webpage, the videos have alot of tearing/distortion, which the original avis did not have-any tips on how to lessen the video size without this effect? thanks :)

The trick was NOT to use format factory at all to resize! Instead I first used virtualdub to remove the audio wav from the avi (the video was silent,but was double the size it should have been). In virtualdub I opened my video, changed the video option to direct stream, and the audio to no audio, then file> saved as avi. I found a freeware tool called AVI Recomp to resize (in its options, I chose a new avi size of 7 megabytes per minute of video, so a 2 min video is 14mb, and in avi recomps 'auditions>resize', maintaining ratio, resized to around 700 width). This gave me very small files easy to send via email (around 15mb) of good quality, with no comb like distortion effect!

Perhaps there is a way to do all this in format factory, but I just couldnt find it. I found avi-recomp at http://www.videohelp.com/tools/AVI-ReComp


ps thanks for the reply - I had written the above before seeing yours, lol :)

[smok3]

what i do generally is:
a. capture to something lossless (if the specific capture utility on specific os allows that)
b. encode to x264, crf XX (usually i do things mute)
c. either post that via flash or html5 player or dump to youtube or similar
d. all i have to send is few bytes url then, like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfvq_skLS8Q&context=C4d56ee6ADvjVQa1PpcFPmJbtdA3NfPtSGvKziesqMxr6T1xiCvDg=

(no re-sizing of any kind, maybe crop the unnecessary parts)

p.s. people sending > 3 Mb over mail are quickly on my ignore list.