Web video resizing/compressing/formatting?

March 7, 2005 11:36 AM

So, I've bitten off more than I can chew. I've been handed a 60mb VOB file of a television commercial that I want to post to the website of said company.

I was thinking the way to go was four versions, large and small sizes, for mpeg and quicktime. Is that a good target? Or is there a better format alternative that I should use?

I'm looking for a freeware/shareware program that will allow me to resize and compress the video and export it to the appropriate formats. Any ideas? Bonus points given if I can use them while being a video idiot.

I can only pass along minimal expenses to the company, so a no/low cost solution is probably the only option. For what it is worth, I see this as a one-time thing, not something I will be doing regularly.

posted by jmevius to computers & internet (8 comments total)

What platform are you doing this on? Transcode can convert all sorts of video types (although Quicktime support is a little sketchy), but it can be difficult to use, to say the least. That said, there seems to be a working gui for it these days.

It should at least work on Linux, *BSD, or MacOS X. I don't know if there's a Windows version or not.
posted by Captain_Tenille at 11:40 AM on March 7, 2005

FFMpegX will convert from VOB to pretty much whatever you want, except for Quicktime. It is free. You could use Quicktime Pro to create Quicktime of various codecs from your FFMpegX-generated MPEG source.
posted by AlexReynolds at 11:48 AM on March 7, 2005

Jmevius,

Two by two is a great way to approach it.

But you're not going to get away for it free, and least not in decent versions.

First, I'd use WMP-9. Microsoft's encoder is free. Can't do better than that.

Second, this link videohelp is specifically to convert Video TS VOB files to MPEG. There are some good tools here.

I'd make the second tool to MPEG and pick it from videohelp based on the freeware capacity.

For a QT to look good, you're going to need sorenson 3 pro codec not free).

Not enough people use/want to use real.

So it's WMP-9/MPEG-1
posted by filmgeek at 11:52 AM on March 7, 2005

or a QT to look good, you're going to need sorenson 3 pro codec not free

You can get a pretty decent filesize/quality trade-off from using JPEG-Photo. Compression takes a while to complete, but the results are good and the decompression (on the viewer's end) is unnoticeable.
posted by AlexReynolds at 11:59 AM on March 7, 2005

Should have mentioned I'm on WinXP (seems to rule out Transcode and FFMpegX completely).

I'm glad I'm at least on target as far as format and size options go. But, how big should the movies be? The commercial is about a minute long -- how big should filesizes be?

I'd already ruled out Real entirely -- just didn't see any reason to subject myself or others to that.

Also, the commercial is as-is -- I won't need any video editing capabilities at all.
posted by jmevius at 12:11 PM on March 7, 2005

What you need, son, is Auto Gordian Knot. Just remember to get version 1.6 because the latest builds have spyware.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:39 PM on March 7, 2005

If you're willing to dabble in the non-free, I find Sony Vegas 5 (used to be Sonic Foundry) fantastic for this type of thing. You'll still need to convert the VOB to straight MPEG2, but once you've done that it's pretty straight forward to convert with Vegas into anything you want.

There is a free trial version that might do the trick.
posted by Leonard at 5:08 AM on March 8, 2005

Apologies for the thread hijack, but has anyone used the Flash Video exporter? Any good/bad experiences? It seems like it would solve many of the compatibility/codec problems that crop up frequently but I've not tried it.

Not free, I'm afraid jmevius.
posted by blag at 10:13 AM on March 8, 2005