[SLL] Need advice on Portable Video Compression

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Feb 24, 2007, Rob Smith wrote:
>On 2/24/07, Tim Maher <tim at consultix-inc.com> wrote:
>>For the occasion of my book hitting #1 on Amazon (hooray!), I was
>>interviewed by my publisher. The seven minute AVI file that came out
>>of the camcorder was 2+ gigs, which is of course an unwieldy size. I
>>made a copy with VirtualDub using the "Microsoft Video 1" codec, which
>>came to 60 meg, and plays perfectly on the Windows XP box it was made
>>on. However, on some Apple machines I've tried, only the sound comes
>>through--no pictures.
>>
>>VirtualDub also offers Cinepak, Indeo, Techsmith, and other codecs.
>>So one question is what's the most portable kind of compression?
>>Or if the best answer is something like "convert from AVI to MP3",
>>where do I get a utility that does that--on Winbloze or Lunix?
>>Is "Transcode" a good choice?
>
>You can use mplayer
>
>mplayer -vo null -ao pcm:file=file.wav
>
>Which dumps the sound to file.wav, and then you can use lame or any
>number of other converters to convert it to mp3 or whatever format you
>want.

That doesn't answer the problem of converting to a video format that's
generally readable.

The last time I had a .avi file that I wanted to see on an Apple, I found
something would convert from avi to mp4 format.  Unfortunaely the video was
pretty horrible as the avi had been created with a codec that is designed
to produce good output from computer screen capture.  I forget the details
offhand, but there was supposed to be a codec that would work with Apple's
QuickTime, but I never could get it to work.

I just did a quick check on versiontracker looking for avi to mov
converters, finding VisualHub 1.21 which claims to convert pretty much any
video format to any other.  It's not free software, but is cheap -- under
$25.00.  There's a demo version available that will do a maximum of 2
minutes of video which would probably be enough to see how it does on this
file.

Bill
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