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Hi, my camera takes videos in MPG format, and I've been converting them to avi so I can put them on DVDs to play in our DVD player. I've noticed that the avi versions are typically less than 1/3 of the size of the original files. On my computer screen the sound and picture appear about as good as the original. Am I losing a great deal of quality doing this? If not, I'd just as soon delete the originals and save some disk space, but I'm reluctant to go ahead and start turfing files until I have more of a clue as to why the files are so much smaller. Thanks in advance for your help!
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Any conversion will ultimately lose quality, but it depends on your conversion settings whether the loss is noticeable or not. MPG (MPEG-1/2) is a very inefficient format compared to what's available these days, and I suspect you're using DivX or Xvid for AVI, which is much more efficient (the 1/3 size, at the same quality, sounds about right for MPG to AVI conversion).
Before you delete the originals, just check to make sure the AVI isn't missing any content and there aren't any audio issues (such as sync issues, which can happen during conversion). -
If you are using FFMPEG to do the conversion, you can use the "-sameq" flag in most versions to keep the same video quality after conversion.
Though, the word "same' is actually kind of miss-leading because it's not really the same, but always a little less, because there is no conversion without some data loss, but hey, it's the best there is out there.Comment
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