Program to compress AVI files

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 8:39 PM, Mark Haney <mhaney at ercbroadband.org> wrote:
>>> Thanks to both. I am talking about encoding to a smaller file size. Any
>>> ideas?
>>
>> mencoder would be a good program.
>>
>> I would suggest first playing it with mplayer and seeing what the current
>> encoding is, if it is already xvid/divx/x264 encoded you won't
>
> I've found mencoder not to be quite as functional as transcode for certain
> applications.  However, I do agree with Roger, you need to find out the
> existing codec/aspect ratio before tinkering with the file. Instead of using
> mplayer, I'd try just using 'file <videoname>', that gives you a good amount
> of info on the file (just in case the file is on a remote system as mine are
> sometimes).
>
> I do have a couple of standard lines for adjusting video files that I'll be
> glad to share if you want.  They aren't anything more than typical
> transcode/mencoder lines with basic options that I"ve saved since I can't
> always remember the options.

Thanks to all for all helpful comments.

The details of my file are:

$ file example.avi
example.avi: RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI, 1024 x 768, 30.00 fps,
video: uncompressed
$

Paul