[thelist] Video compression help?

Chris Cothrun cothrun at ix.netcom.com
Fri Oct 3 18:05:45 CDT 2003


Hi Joel,

On 3 Oct 2003 , <Joel Konkle-Parker <thelist at lists.evolt.org>> wrote:
> I know absolutely nothing about video compression. All I know
> is that I have a setup here that grabs a series of frames from
> a black & white lab camera and saves them to an uncompressed
> .avi file. I understand that video codecs exist for the
> express purpose of making these uncompressed AVIs smaller.
> I've been looking around some, but I still have no idea how I
> go about using these things to compress my video. Does anyone
> have any advice for me? Preferably an open source codec and
> compression tool?

Assuming you're on Windows, Virtual Dub 
(http://virtualdub.org/) is your open source swiss army knife 
of AVI conversion. 

MPEG 4 is one of the popular codecs nowadays, the Microsoft 
implementation comes with their media player, DivX is a 
version, Quicktime has a version, etc. XviD 
(http://xvid.org/) is an open source MPEG 4 codec, although 
its legal redistribution is questionable as there are patents 
on MPEG 4. MPEG 4 is also relatively CPU hungry.

Transcode (http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/)
seems to be a VirtualDub equivalent on Linux, at least for 
codec conversion.

Those should serve as a starting point, I'll leave further 
searching to you unless you have some specific questions.



Chris



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