Key Post: Recommend a utility for shrinking .AVI files..?

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Dr Moriarty

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G'day all,

My Fuji Finepix S5000 has the option to take nice little .avi clips (with sound), but the resulting files are uncompressed and take up a lot of disk space — as in over 8Mb for a 15-second sequence! The problem is not so much HDD storage space as simply the fact that I can't easily share these files... (try e-mailing an 8.4Mb attachment to someone!)

Can anyone recommend a utility to compress them, without losing the soundtrack? — and ideally free, even as a limited trial version! :)

Cheers,

Dr. M.
 
Re: Recommend a utility for shrinking .AVI files..?

AVI is just a 'container' format. In other words it contains the information (video and audio) in some format which is interpreted by a codec on the playback machine. I'd imagine the AVI's you have are probably just uncompressed audio/video (audio-video interleave == AVI).

The trendy formats these days are Divx and Xvid. The idea is that you use a utility to convert your AVI to a Divx or Xvid AVI where the content has been encoded using the Divx/Xvid encoder. Then the person playing it back will also need the Divx or Xvid decoder because when Media Player or whatever opens it it will go "Right, I need the Xvid/Divx decoder" and try to load it. The decoder then takes over and does all the work while passing the decoded data back to Media Player.

With that in mind, here's an AVI to Divx/Xvid guide. Looks like a lot of work.
 
Re: Recommend a utility for shrinking .AVI files..?

Thanks, fatherd,

Have downloaded VirtualDub, and will try that page you provided the link to if I can't find an easier "one-click" (or almost!) solution. Trawled CNet's downloads page and got a trial copy of the HT Mpeg encoder, which only lasts 15 days and won't handle clips above 100 seconds (but it's a start!) Just converted that 8.4Mb clip to 1.79Mb using the DivX codec, so have mailed off the shrunk file to a colleague (it's a clip of his little girl having her first swim! :) )

Thing is — as you say — it all depends on whether his own confluther has the DivX codec installed...

Cheers, Dr. M.
 
Re: Recommend a utility for shrinking .AVI files..?

It can be downloaded from here (includes another player though).
 
Re: Recommend a utility for shrinking .AVI files..?

Thanks again, fatherd — I have it already. Reckon my best bet might be to WinZip that onto a couple of floppies as a spanned archive and mail him those in an envelope — I think his workplace's network policy prevents him from downloading, and it would take forever over a dial-up connection...

Cheers again,

Dr. M.

P.S. My own workplace has a flat-rate always-on T1 connection and a fairly liberal usage policy (which we all try not to abuse! ;) ) — but one thing that does annoy me occasionally (i.e. when the network is "down"...) is the Windows Media Player's habit of connecting and downloading the needed codecs each time you play a file that requires it. Is there any way of downloading/installing them permanently to the WMP..? Or should I just download/install a different non-MS player?
 
Re: Recommend a utility for shrinking .AVI files..?

Hmm. Never had the pleasure of experiencing that kind of behaviour. Divx/Xvid, MP3 and WMA constitute the main traffic of my Media Player. Even then I thought that once it would down load that would be the end of it.

I occasionally use the VideoLAN. It's great because it's entirely self-contained and doesn't rely on 3rd party codecs. For example, it can playback DVD even without having to install a DVD codec which only comes with licensed DVD playback software.
 
Re: that kind of behaviour...

I know that every second time I open a video file with WMP, the readout says "connecting....downloading codec...." before it plays. It's fairly instantaneous when the network connection is working, but gives an "error downloading codec" message and won't play the file when we have a "notwork" problem (which is fairly frequently, but no-one dares complain!)

I'll try that VideoLAN player, 'though... thanks again!

Dr. M.
 
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