Burning AVI's to disk

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My question is this. If one wanted to make a CD that was going to be no longer than 5 minutes or so, and only wanted to play it on hsi computer, would it be possible jsu tto leave the vidoe in uncompresses .avi format and burn it as a data disc and paly it on CD-Rom. Theoretically this would provide the best quality video as no loss would occur due to compression. Anyone have any experience with this. Please respond as i am very interested in doing this. Thanks

-- derek sider (dereksider@home.com), February 01, 2001

Answers

Yes, of course you can do this.

Several things to keep in mind. 1) If you want it in pure uncompressed AVI, you better have a fast CD ROM drive. If the drive is not fast enough, playback from disc will be poor. 2) Pure uncompressed AVI is HUGE. I don't remember the data rates for it since I don't use it but I don't think you could fit 5 minutes worth on a single 650MB disc.

Here is what I suggest, use a codec such has Huffyuv which is lossless but still compressed. Approx 120-130MB per minute. Even with that you will need a VERY HIGH speed CD drive to playback from. Think of it like this: 5 mins X 120MB = 600MB (almost a full disc). You want to play this back from your cd player? Can your CD drive copy a full disc of data to your HD in 5 minutes? Probably not. Well, then it won't be able to play an AVI at that bitrate from the CD drive either.

Your best bet would be to either re-encode the AVI to mpeg1 3MB bitrate using Tsunami Mpeg Encoder (freeware, look in other threads for info on it) or convert the AVI to something like Indeo V5.1 (now Ligos). Divx is good bet also. However, for your situation, I would very much recommend converting it to mpeg1 3MB bitrate. The conversion won't take too long (upto 1 hour for 5 mins video, at high quality using some filters), and the results will actually look better than a raw AVI.

Good Luck,

EG Marshall

-- EG Marshall (4me@schoolmail.com), February 01, 2001.


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