Need to compress videos down to 1MB/min, at decent 320x240 resolution?

[Trey2576]

I need to put these videos on a portable media player, and there are a lot of them, so I need very good compression.

It's definitely possible, as on a previous forum I saw a guy do it with MainConcept Reference, he just used some settings on it that he won't tell me about, "at least not for free". I could get a video to this size as well without his help, but big artifacts randomly appear, taking up a quarter of the screen. He however managed to get it at the same quality, pretty much constantly (and changing the bitrate to the "constant" option doesn't fix it for me).

What could he have done to get the quality so good, and are there perhaps some other H.264 encoders that you KNOW or at least highly think will compress to 1MB/min, 320x240 resolution, at decdent quality?

Here is the video I am talking about: http : // dl.dropbox.com /u/27054690/Mario%20Kart%20240x180%2016x9%20H264-MC%20120kbps%20Sample. mp4 (had to break down link).

It may not be 320x240, but he said it wasn't even a challenge to get that compression at that resolution, so it must be pretty easy to add 80x60 to that resolution. Even if it loses a tiny bit of quality.

[admin]

Do you mean 1 Mbits/s or 1 MBytes/s, because 1 MBytes/s is actually quite high for video (it's DVD quality with MPEG-2, and with H.264, equals decent 720p quality).

Assuming 1 Mbit/s, really that's again more than enough for 320x240 video, near-DVD quality if you use Xvid and double the resolution, and with H.264, you can probably get away with an even lower bitrate.

For conversion tools, I'd recommend VidCoder or MeGUI for H.264 encoding, or AutoGK if you want Xvid. Guides for all are available here:

Articles - Digital Digest

If you use VidCoder (and I recommend that you do), you should use "constant quality" mode and experiment a bit with the settings (the higher, the lower the quality, but you should keep within 17 to 23). The file size will be unpredictable, but you'll end up with files of similar quality if you've got multiple files and want some consistency.

[Trey2576]

Do you mean 1 Mbits/s or 1 MBytes/s, because 1 MBytes/s is actually quite high for video (it's DVD quality with MPEG-2, and with H.264, equals decent 720p quality).

Assuming 1 Mbit/s, really that's again more than enough for 320x240 video, near-DVD quality if you use Xvid and double the resolution, and with H.264, you can probably get away with an even lower bitrate.

For conversion tools, I'd recommend VidCoder or MeGUI for H.264 encoding, or AutoGK if you want Xvid. Guides for all are available here:

*CANT HAVE URLS IN POST*

If you use VidCoder (and I recommend that you do), you should use "constant quality" mode and experiment a bit with the settings (the higher, the lower the quality, but you should keep within 17 to 23). The file size will be unpredictable, but you'll end up with files of similar quality if you've got multiple files and want some consistency.

Sorry for the late reply.

No, I mean 1 megabyte per minute. 17 kilobytes/sec. How could I compress a video to that file size at 320x240 resolution, with decent quality?

[admin]

Sorry, I misread your post.

The suggestions still stands though, as Xvid (H.263) and H.264 are the most efficient codecs for low quality video. I would try Xvid first, since the output would be more compatible for playback on PCs and certain hardware players. YouTube uses a combination of H.263 and H.264 for all its uploaded content, but uses H.263 for the lowest quality (400x240). They use a bitrate slightly higher than what you have in mind though, around 250 kbps versus the 136 kbps (17 KB/s * 8 = 136 kbps) you require.