Hey guys, i use motv to record off my composite input but i am having trouble trying to figure out what the best way to record a feature length movie without the file being several gigs. I see files all the time on the p2p networks that are entire movies that will fit on a single cd. How do you accomplish this in linux? I have tried several file formats including raw and then encoding with the mjpegtools suite to no avail. Well, I guess i should say that it helped a little but the files are still way to large. Could someone give me a few suggestions. I am certainly not married to motv if you can give me a better solution. Thanks, Peter

There is *much* to learn in this area ... Far too much for a post here. I'd suggest you read some of the docs on Doom9 and then investigate transcode or mencoder.

The short answer is that you'll want to compress them to DivX, XviD, or something similar.

In Acidrip, there's a little box in the preferences in the GUI tool that comes with it for customizing the size of you en-product AVI file.

Keyword in size of movie type files.. bitrate

The codec is more of a factor than the bitrate, but yeah, that too.

how abuot we just say that they are BOTH important for different reasons.... no need to fight!

and also let's say acidrip can easy handle both.

hey what about scaling the moving down to little lower scale

that would also reduce the size i think

regards

Uuuum, Ok. I was only making a statement of fact, not trying to ruffle anyone's feathers. Apologies if it came across wrong

masand's suggestion is a good one too. I usually take my DVD res recordings (ReplayTV is great) down to 512x362 (or something like that).

no it wouldn't, not directly at least. with the same bitrate and codec, a smaller picture would simply mean that it was better quality, not a smaller file. you just then have the ability to reduce the bitrate inline, which is where a smaller file would come from...

no no, i was just in a dumb mood.....

but really... again the codec won't directly affect the size of the file, just the bitrate that that codec is encoding at. but a low compression codec will obviously suck more than a high compression one on a lower bitrate... i'm being far far too picky huh?

sometime back
i had created an avi file after changing the codec
and as i made new ones wth less scale and same codec the size as well quality decreased

also i have seen many clips on the internet with size difference and what diference they have is, of scale

although ,changing the codec and bit rate will reduce the size upto a great extent

regards

Compress a 60 minute 352x240 video clip in MPEG1 and then do it in XviD at the same bitrate and tell me which file is smaller. That was my only point.

But why use either of those when avi is by far the better quality of any I've used. Sure they're a little bigger at times, but its all about quality, hard drive space is cheap these days..

AVI is a container which holds a video and an audio stream (such as XviD and MP3 ) just like OGM or MKV. You can put video created by DivX, XviD, theora, Huff, MJPEG, DV or a whole host of other codecs in the container. AVI is technically inferior in a lot of ways to the others out there, but that's a whole other discussion.

You can put an MPEG video stream into an AVI, but you don't typically want to as hardly anything will play it.

As for size -- If size was no object I'd just have a ton of 4GB MPEG2's ripped straight from DVDs on my disks (no recompression), but disks aren't *that* cheap

Thanks for all the input guys. I'll check out a few of the suggestions here. Obviously, this is a little more complicated than I first thought. Oh, well, I'm sure I'll figure it out just like everything else after reading the mans and the docs.../p