Program to compress AVI files

[Roger Heflin]

Paul Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Mark Haney <mhaney at ercbroadband.org> wrote:
>>> Is there some program to compress AVI files?
>> Compress?  Video and graphics files tend not to compress well at all. Are we
>> talking ZIP compression?  Or encoding to a smaller file size?
> 
> Thanks to both. I am talking about encoding to a smaller file size. Any ideas?
> 
> Paul
> 

mencoder would be a good program.

I would suggest first playing it with mplayer and seeing what the current 
encoding is, if it is already xvid/divx/x264 encoded you won't be able to likely 
improve things much without lowering the resolution or quality.  x264 is 
supposed to be better than xvid/divx but it is probably not a huge amount, and 
re-encoding (even on a fast machine) will take anywhere from greater than actual 
time of the video down to 1/4-1/5 for lower resolution videos.   If it is not 
already one of the good codecs then just reencoding it with the proper settings 
will be able to reduce it a fair amount.

I do a fair amount of re-encoding of various sorts.

                           Roger