Compression software for a Flip Ultra

April 26, 2008 1:54 PM

I have just bought a Flip Ultra but the included compression software to make large video files email or YouTube ready is unbelievably slow. I'm on a PC, running XP. Can you recommend any third party compression software?
posted by lometogo to computers & internet (7 comments total)

avidemux
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:03 PM on April 26

Seconding avidemux. Hands down the best all-in-one editor I've used. Little known secret: On Windows the SVN builds will even take WMV input without using the included Avisynth proxy.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:07 PM on April 26

FWIW don't use Adobe Premier Elements (the version that's usually a freebie with things) - that's what I've been using and the files end up huge, whatever the settings.
posted by Artw at 2:18 PM on April 26

Thanks, Qxntpqbbbqxl and Inspector.gadget for your recommendation of Avidemux. On looking at it, I guess it's mainly an editor. I simply want a program to compress a large vid file into some format that will be easily sent to YouTube or sent as an email attachment.

Will AVMUX do that easily?

Thanks,
Terence
posted by lometogo at 3:14 PM on April 26

Terence, I almost posted the exact same question recently, because I wanted to put some videos up on YouTube. Since I have a paid subscription to Divx Pro, I found that I have a component of Divx Pro called Divx Converter, and it lets me convert files to highly compressed Divx format. It worked well for me, though it did not technically convert to YouTube's flash format. It simply shrunk the file considerably, and YouTube took care of the rest.

Uploading a large file to YouTube is still a tedious lengthy process. I am using blip.tv for my larger, longer videos (not limited to 100MB and 10 minutes... I have several 30-60 minute vids on blip.tv, and can link to a couple of them through my webpage at...oh never mind, not gonna self-link!)
posted by newfers at 3:41 PM on April 26

I use SUPER. Not entirely user-friendly and may require a little trial and error before it does exactly what you want it to, but it's a decent GUI wrapper for “ffmpeg, MEncoder, mplayer, x264, mppenc, ffmpeg2theora & the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn.”
posted by aydeejones at 3:52 PM on April 26

Will AVMUX do that easily?

Avidemux will compress to XviD (open source, generally considered even better than DivX), H.264 (via x264), DV, Flash (.flv), DVD format, MJPEG, MPEG Transport stream, and a whole variety of lossless formats. It can also do AC3, MP3, AAC, WAV, PCM, LPCM, MP2, and Vorbis audio. Container formats include AVI, MP4, MPG, VOB, TS, MKV, OGM, and FLV. Avidemux implements all this with simple drop-down menus and easy configuration options and has its own bit-rate calculator to choose output file size with accuracy.

I've used to to compress from DVD and HDTV to DivX-equivalent AVI movies and iPod format. It is very versatile. If you'd like to send me some mefi mail about specifically what you're looking to do (attributes of the source file and what you'd like as output) I can walk you through the steps to doing it. For e-mail, you could send something like an AVI file at a lower resolution with XviD and Mp3 audio. For Youtube, now that they have have high quality H.264 files available (clicking on the "see this in higher quality" link) I'd probably compress to H.264 with AAC audio in an MP4 container to make the most out of my filesize and allow for the highest quality conversion.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 4:53 PM on April 26