Compress a group of AVIs to fit on a DVD (in AVI format)

[PeteRooney]

Good afternoon,

Sorry for the newbie type question, but I've been out of practice for a while!
If I have, say, 13 AVIs that I need to fit on a 4.64GB DVD (this would be for AVI archiving purposes, NOT to create a watchable DVD) and the total size of these files exceeds the size of the DVD, is there any tool out there that I can use to compress all the AVIs to say (for example) 97% of their original size (or whatever the compression factor needs to be) to make the files fit on the DVD?
It's a sort of AVI batch shrinker that I need, I think. Does such a thing exist, so I can say "make all THESE fit on THIS DVD?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Pete

[MilesAhead]

Avi files are playable on a stand-alone with divx support. They are just burned as a "data disc." The only way I know to reduce the size is to reencode with fewer bits. You can use a tool such as AviDemux to reencode.

Instead of doing them all it might be better to choose one as "expendable" and take all the quality loss on that video, if the size difference is that small.

I would use AviDemux 2.4(because xvid encoding is much better in one pass mode than the new 2.5) and just encode that one file to output size. There's a Wiki for AviDemux with tons of documentation. Plus it's fairly intuitive to use.

[PeteRooney]

Thank you - the AVIs in question are the 13 episodes for season 1 of a new series, so I can't imagine any of them are expendable, so I'll give AVIDemux a go. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you!

Pete

[MilesAhead]

Here's a concise guide for xvid codec explaining bvops and all that other stuff. After reading you should have a good idea how to set AviDemux 2.4 for good results with one pass. Or 2 pass if you have the time to spare.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-xvid.html