How To compress dat files of 1.6 GB to 300 MB Since My Friend Is Going To Burn A Single VCD With 2 Movies

-- Rohit (celvin3@hotmail.com), October 19, 2001

Answers

The short answer - you can't. The long answer is that you can do it if you are willing to have a VCD with quality so unbelievable poor that it will be unwatchable. If your friend insists on doing this, he/she will have to re-encode the movie at a terribly low bit rate of something like 300 Mbps. I guarantee you that you will regret doing this. Quality and length of recording time are diametrically opposed to each other. Under normal circumstances you can have 74 minutes of VCD video on a 74 min. CD-R, 80 minutes of VCD video on an 80 min. CD-R, etc. To fit 2 full length movies on one VCD would require bit rates so low that the screen would consist of fuzzy, unwatchable images with LOTS of blocks in them. The freely available TMPGenc program (www.tmpgenc.com) could be used to do this if your friend insists. I'm not willing to explain how to do this as I think it's a terrible idea, but the following sites might be able to provide some guidance: www.vcdhelp.com www.doom9.net www.labdv.com www.digital-digest.com In summation - there is no way to compress the video to do this, but it can be re-encoded (ugh!) at a bit rate low enough to do this. It will take a LONG time to do though. It might easily take your friend 8 hours or maybe much much more per movie to do this. Have you ever seen REALLY BAD Real Media video? This should give you a rough idea of what to expect.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), October 19, 2001.