video compression questions

TomTomTom

TomTomTom

TomTomTom

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I have a pile of uncompressed video that I want to archive keeping the best possible quality while getting reasonable file size. I'm not very well versed on the features of each codec.

So far I've been using AVS Video Converter which is a very good app and makes some default options choices that has helped me familiarize a little.

The choice I made so far is MS MPEG4 v2 with MP3 128 bit for audio. This makes larger files than XVid or DivX which I'm assuming is because it does not lose as much quality in the compression. Is this the best choice considering my preferences as stated in the first line in this msg? Is there something better? I don't mind a file size of up to 2x the previous... if the quality is significantly better...

EDIT: oh and I prefer a codec that WinMedia player will play by default without plugins or whatever.

Also with the MS MPEG4 v2, I left the codec's settings at the default: the slider being 75% on the side of "crispness" and data rate at "3000 kb/s" (which doesn't sound right). But if I just, for example, put the slider 100% toward "crispness" is this like getting "more toward lossless"?

Anyway once I make the final choice on the video codec, I will erase all the original raw video, so I want to be sure.

Thanks for help!
 
Last edited:
Thanks for reply. Well I noticed with XVid that it's resulting video bitrate is far lower... I've always assumed that XVid is favored because it has a nice balance of quality/size for video shared on the internet... for things like "Snakes on a Plane" ;) ... but in my case broadcasting or sharing bandwidth is not an issue... just not completely clogging my HD.

But is there some other magic behind XVid that makes the lower bitrate irrelevant?

I'll have a look at the other codecs you suggested.

Thanks!
 
joeyjojo said:
Not my area of expertise, but here goes anyway.

Mpeg4 is ok. If going with mpeg use ac3 audio. I'd also try a high bitrate xvid. Should be better compression, with similar quality if the bitrate is high enough.

There's a lot of info here and here. That site is great.
Click to expand...

I'll review again the XVid and Mpeg4 options. Is there some interleaving issue with the choice of audio? AVS just by default had "mpeg layer 3" for the audio on mpeg4 v2.

The stuff on lossless looks interesting.

Thanks!
 
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