But, it’s only like 5 minutes long. I know that videos on, say, youTube are way smaller than that for a similar length.
It’s not a full screen video, maybe 400px300p or so.
So, basically, is there readily available software for compressing it? Under properties, its “Type of FIle” is give as “movie clip”. It’s suffix is mpg.
I have HP photosmart premier (or something) that came installed with my laptop. I can change the endpoints, and rotate it, , but I can’t save it as a different type, or compress it.
Sounds like the video you have is probably already compressed in some way, but perhaps not optimally for the application you have in mind.
bbMPEG will do what you want (and more) - you can control all sorts of things such as the bit rate, the frequency of key frames, etc. As well as resizing/rescaling.
I’d like to be able to upload the video, and the quality is much higher than it need to be. I’m sure it could be compressed. I’ll try that freeware. Thanks.
35 megs for 5 minutes is not very big at all. You could get it smaller by converting to MP4, if you really want to. But doesn’t YouTube take 100MB files?
If mangetout’s suggestion doesn’t work for you, there are a few other things you can use, depending on what sort of output you want.
The first one should already be installed on your computer. Windows Movie Maker will import mpg files, and will output at a variety of bitrates and resolutions. It also has decent editing features. The movie will output as a .wmv file.
For better quality compression, i’d recommend compressing to XVid or DivX, which outputs as an .avi file. For this, you need the appropriate codec (Koepi’s XVid codec works great), and the free VirtualDub program.
VirtualDub will import the mpg file, and you then have a variety of filters and compression settings that you can use to determine the output size and quality of the video.
Unless you have a particularly slow internet connection and need a smaller file to upload, i’d just go ahead and upload the one you have. 7Mb per minute is a bitrate of about 1000kbps, and most broadband users will have no trouble streaming that bitrate. I guess it might be nice to get the bitrate down below 768 for people with slower broadband, but uploading the fileas it is should be fine.
If you want to get it all the way down to YouTube size, encode it with Flash Video like they do. Riva FLV Encoder is an incredibly easy to use, free program that will do the trick.
Edit: Just wanted to note that you won’t be able to play it in Media Player if you go this route. You’ll have to download a free specialized player for it or stick it on a web page and view it in a browser.
Well, one thing I did was chop the file into pieces at home, and try to upload about 10MB.
I was moving the file to a google page that limits the size to 10MB. But, it tried to upload for over an hour, gave me no indication of progress, and I finally had to cancel it.
Now, 10MB is 80 megabits, and my connection at home says 54mbps, IINM. Now, I don’t know if that’s the rate that my laptop and wireless modem are talking, or the rate that I’m receiving over the DSL line.
Further, I don’t know (but I doubt) that that is what my upload rate is.
Any idea how long uploading 10MB over an average DSL connection should take?
And, I don’t think I have windows move maker on my laptop. I have window media player, and some HP bloatware, but I don’t think I have windows movie maker.
The 54mbps is your local network speed. It’s definitely not the speed that you get when communicating with the internet.
If you want to test your broadband upload and download speed, you can do it here. A fairly typical DSL speed, especially here in Baltimore, would probably be about 1500 down/300 up, roughly. This means that your upload speed would be about 300kpbs, meaning that a 10MB file would take somewhere in the vicinity of 5 minutes or so to upload, maybe a little longer depending on the server that’s receiving it.
As for Movie Maker, it’s possible that you have it even though you don’t see an icon for it anywhere. Try this:
Start > Run
then type moviemk.exe and press enter. If you have Movie Maker on your computer, it will start up.