hello, just a few questions on on video whatnot for linux if i may ...

what is the best video codec (or whatever its called, format maybe?) that gives the best compression on videos? in windows the videos i made with movie maker (just combined other clips from what i downloaded .. i like to have things organized in 1 file if its of the same origin) had very little space to movies i had in the same way with avidemux, i used every video codec it offered, and every audio one, but the smallest i could get it was about 5000k while the ones (same ones pretty much) were about 1000k (or at least half of 5000k) .. anyways, i do use mencoder to change the videos into mpg4 (i think thats it,... all i know is it tells mencoder to use lavac mpg4 codec), could that be the problem of the bigger file sizes? also is there a command util that could make files smaller? (like maybe mencoder but i don't know what options to tell it)

Im a big fan of using Xvid or Divx codecs for my .avi fiiles...it should make them much smaller than raw mpeg 4.....you can get the codec pack at http://www.divx.com/divx/linux/

linux_terror

ahh, after a few days of trail and error i finally remembered the search feature for the man pages (and

anyways, according to some docs divx from that site is not recommended, but mpeg4 is the same thing, (gentoo installed it all for me so i can use anyone)

anyways, thanks to the man pages i can shrink the bigger files down quite a bit (i got one from 228MB down to 154MB ... I'm now trying some other options to see if i can get it smaller)

anyways, i still haven't got the correct options in very well, as the window's created files are much smaller still (about 2/3 the size of mine at least) .. but i can free up enough space now to allow the files to a bit bigger

thanks linux_terror, that linked helped a lot

you can try matroska: http://www.matroska.org/

AFAIK movie maker put .asf's out which are very high compressed.Of course that isn't that great for the quality.You can always reduce the bitrate or do 2pass encoding if you go for a certain file size.There is a lot of info here: http://www.doom9.org/
It's not Linux specific though.You can also try avidemux if you want a gui.

yea, I'm dipping into the lacopts options, the vqscale options really compresses things smaller, it does make the screen a bit blocky, but for most of the videos, they were already blocky and it only makes them smaller, bitrate also helps (i use about 600 and 2 pass), and the dia options can help a little (saved me a MB or 2 on bigger files) ..