Making mpegs smaller?

[UKGuest44]

Hello,

I've started building up a collection of mpeg's from recordings. While most of the time I have converted some to xvid AVIs which are much smaller, I'd like the ability to sometimes make a smaller mpeg out of an already existing one.

IE turn an 800mb mpeg into a 200mb one? I believe this is possible because I have seen around 30 minute mpegs with a size of 200mb, the quality isnt quite as good, but still looks acceptable, but the filesize is much smaller.

How would I be able to achieve something like this?

Thanks very much.

[Torque]

I used Ulead's Video Studio software (came free with a video card I bought) to convert a 1.8GB '24' episode down to 700MB (just fit on a CD). I changed the resolution to 320x240 and the video bit rate to 1200Kbs constant, 128Kbs for audio, MPEG1 format. It took nearly 1.5hrs to create it... and that's on a pretty fast system, so I'm looking for some other software... but if that's acceptable for you, it'll get the job done.

[Aleax]

Wow... MPEG-1... actually, the official spec for MPEG-1 is 352x240 (or 288 if PAL) with 1150Kbps cbr video, 224Kbps audio. And IMHO, you can get a LOT better results with MPEG-4 with ~1374kbps to split between audio and video. You WILL still have to reduce your output resolution to make that work, but I find that for general stuff, 480x360 or so looks fine and can work well with lower bitrates. At that resolution, a 22-minute (30-minutes, commercials edited out) episode fits within 1/4 CD (175MB).

Unless you have a specific reason for creating an MPEG-1, I'd stay away from the format. It's old (1993) and outdated for most purposes.

Also, VideoReDo can recompress MPEG-2's to lower bitrate versions... I guess this is an option if they must be MPEGs... Mostly I use it to cut commercials prior to feeding the trimmed-down MPEG-2 files into AutoGK... heh, I'm lazy... but 'tis funny; I learned to do what AutoGK does manually before I even messed with it, so I feel okay using it.