Program to compress AVI files

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 20:16 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Mark Haney <mhaney at ercbroadband.org> wrote:
> >> Is there some program to compress AVI files?
> >
> > Compress?  Video and graphics files tend not to compress well at all. Are we
> > talking ZIP compression?  Or encoding to a smaller file size?
> 
> Thanks to both. I am talking about encoding to a smaller file size. Any ideas?

Once again: AVI files are almost as compressed as they can be already.
The only way to make them noticeably smaller is to extract the
multimedia content and re-encode it at a lower resolution, with
corresponding loss of quality. You might want to look at mencoder or
ffmpeg to get an idea, but a great deal depends on how much lossage you
are willing to accept and what the original media format is. Note that
"AVI" is simply a container format, the actual content will be MP3 or
WAV or MPEG or ...

poc