Full Explanation Needed Please - Video Formats

rctneil

rctneil

rctneil

Associate
Joined
31 Jan 2007
Posts
1,860
Hello,
Over the past few months, I ahve been aiming to tidy up all the files on my system into a system I can manage better and find things quicker. So far, I have:

- New filing system on D:\ for all my stuff. (This makes the "My Pictures" etc folders out of work as I now prefer filing everything manually and have put Windows 7's libraries to good use here.

- Music is 96% completed. New organisational structure, all songs tagged and manually checked, all tracks also have album art added. This system now works in iTunes perfectly. All the "AUTO" stuff in iTunes has been disabled so iTunes is used ONLY to browse, play and sync to iPhone.

- Pictures is about 60%. My method for pictures is via Adobe Lightroom. All my albums are slowly being imported and keyworded. I really love this application for doing this and it makes finding and displaying pictures sooo much easier.

Now, It's videos where I have not started sorting yet. I am in complete confusion about what is the best and most efficient way of organising my video files. You can see the sorts of ways I like my files to be organised by the way I ahve done the stuff above so I am hoping some of you guys will be able to help me figure this out.

The types of Video files I have, (so far, all are jumbled into one large folder, waiting to be sorted), are, small videos captured by digital cameras, videos saved from video sharing sites, films ripped from dvd's and then tv documentaries downloaded from sites.

All of these are in different resolutions, formats and allsorts. I am at a complete loss with how to organise them all.

The main problem being that there are so many resolutions and formats, I have no idea what organisational technique will work with all types.

For instance, is there anything similar to iTunes for Videos?

I know, ITunes can manage videos but it cannot manage all of them, whcih is something I would prefer.

Another problem is that I do not understand all the different video formats, eg: mpg, avi, mov, mkv, m4p.

Can someone please attempt to explain each.

Also, I find that if for instance, I play 2 mp4 files, the resolution or aspect ratio of each are different and I ahve no idea how to sort them all out. Some have black bars top and bottom, some do not.

I hope you guys can see how confusing this all looks to me.

I am no Video expert at all therefore I am hoping some of you can come together to provide me with some answers to these questions and solutions to the problems I have posed.

All help is highly appreciated.

Thankyou

Regards,
Neil
 
Right, I'll go and ask for advice on another forum. Thanks for nothing.

I thought forums were places you could ask for advice and support, but obviously not.
 
What do you want to do - do you really want to understand the difference between AVI and MKV, and why some videos are encoded with black borders and others aren't? Or do you just want a sensible way of organising your video collection? I don't think the former is necessary for the latter. You don't need to understand sample rates or the difference between MP3 and AAC to organise your music!

I haven't really found an application for organising videos which works better than having a decent folder structure and playing the files via VLC or MPC-HD. Perhaps you could just divide the videos into 'Films', 'TV', 'Personal' and 'YouTube' folders? Then you could organise the films and TV shows either alphabetically or by genre, organise the file sharing ones according to type of content, and the personal ones chronologically or by event.
 
I do sort of want to know the differences between the video formats and extensions. Nothing major but just the general "gist". How to sort them out so I can get them all into one common and good format and what settings to use to make sure I get no black borders and they are the highest and best quality they can be?
 
rctneil said:
get them all into one common and good format
Click to expand...

they are the highest and best quality they can be
Click to expand...
The problem you have is that those two aims aren't really compatible. Say you have one TV series in one video format and another TV series in another format. If you want a common format, you're going to have to convert at least one of them.

Because all the videos you have will use some form of compression, converting a video from one format to another will always degrade the quality. Each format will use a different algorithm to decide which data to keep and which to throw out - you're compressing data which has already been compressed. It's like putting a bag of flour through two sieves with differently-shaped holes - you'll end up with less flour than if you'd only used one.

(Technically, file types like AVI and MKV aren't actually video formats. They're container formats, each of which can contain many different types of video and audio. But not all containers support all video formats and all features - so getting all the videos to be the same file type is invariably going to involve converting some video, which, as I said above, is usually a bad idea.)
 
What you are asking is very complex. Why not just sort them as follows:

Movies, TV, Digital Cameras, etc etc

Really, there is almost no need to sort via resolution etc, and like someone above pointed out, it will be almost impossible to sort via resolution. Video are simply different resolutions based on the source etc.

As for converting to all one source with good quality, and not having black borders - that is pretty much an impossibility. As you convert between formats, a codec has to be used, and you will always lose some quality. Also, .avi is only a video container, not really a format, so that get's complicated. You will get black borders based on the source and target resolutions, so again, impossible to have videos without borders, unless you want everything to be stretched. A video in 16:9 will always have black borders on a 16:10 monitor, because of the difference in resolution. It's just how it works sadly. What Mattus has said explains it a lot better than I have :)

Just get a very good folder structure up and running, nothing is better than that. Simple arrange by basic categories, and then by events etc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom