a good video compression util
 

I've used Auto Gordian Knot for DVD to DIVX and xvid compression and it's really great how you tell the program how big you want to compressed file size to be and everything.

Is there a program like this for .avi compression? Specifically converting captured DV footage to xvid or DIVX. I haven’t found a really nice tool to help in doing this yet. Does anyone know of anything?

thanks

-happymaan

There's nandub that can compress files into divx 311a (mostly used divx codec for large files). You can find most of the info on http://www.doom9.org/ . Also it wouldnt hurt to read up on the forums, you can find quite a bit of info.

I like Bink. Its a damn good codec. http://www.radgametools.com

Check under Bink and download Bink and Smacker. Its an easy to use encoder/decoder taht supports many file formats.

If you don't mind the files being converted to .wmv format, Windows Movie Maker 2 (available at microsoft.com) has some really flexible compression settings. You can import your avi, then save it again and it lets you pick the exact file size you want the video to be (Sounds like what you were talking about with the other program). It does a great job of keeping the quality too, for the most part. I was able to bring a 12 meg, 3 minute video (with audio) down to 1.9 megs and still retain decent video quality...Audio was another story though.

It would only be practical for shorter clips though, because it takes some time for it to import your clip. Plus you can only save as .wmv (if I remember correctly).

Probably not quite what you were looking for, but I thought it was worth mentioning :)