How do you compress a home video?

Splitting, compressing video (.DAT) file

• I shot a video in mini DV of 15 minutes duration and got it converted to Video CD format by a third party for a small fee. The resulting file is a DAT file of 150 MB that can be played on Windows Media Player or home Video CD player. (The home video CD is popular in Asia but not the US.) I need to email this file but could not compress this file much. I tried ZIP and ALZip. I use WindowsXP. Question: Is there a program that can compress DAT files substantially in 'spanned archives'? If not, please suggest the best file split program. There are several file split programs available as freeware or for a price. Pl suggest the best. If it is a freeware (preferable but not necessary) kindly ensure that it works and is user friendly. Kindly support your answer - why you consider it the best. Ideally the recipient of email should not need any program to extract/ combine the files ; if he does, he should be able to download the program free. (I cannot oblige him to buy after all.) Also, for the recipient, it must be easy (or automatic) to combine the file into one.

• Answer:

  Unfortunately, compressing VCD video will not save you much in overhead relative to your 150mb file size, and the medium through which you are considering sending the file (e-mail). Most e-mail providers do not allow individual messages of over 2mb (hotmail) to about 10mb (many local ISPs). On top of this, a total mailbox quota of ~50-~100 mbs is normal as well. Make sure that your recipient is able to receive this much information no matter how split it is before you send off the e-mails, or you'll just waste your time uploading. As an example I took a 34mb VCD capable MPG (same as the .dat file in the video subdirectory of the VCD) to get an estimate of how a compression tool would benefit. What I found is that compressing the mpg file with WinRAR (free for evaluation use, and capable of making self-extracting multipart archives) only yields a ~10% (4mb) decrease in filesize, which can be applied to a ~15mb decrease in filesize for your VCD. This may seem like a bit better, until you realize that it still doesn't help you overcome the transfer hurdles I mentioned before. WinRAR (www.rarsoft.com) has a simple multispan option on the add to archive dialog box called "Split to volumes, bytes" which allows you to type in a number such as 2000000 (2mb) so that you can make roughly 75 parts able to be filtered through to your friend, or roughly 15 parts if his ISP is more lenient with large e-mail attachments. They have great documentation by pressing F1 (or going to the help menu) which walks you through multispanning. My next and best suggestion would be to forego the e-mail AND compression/spanning procedure and instead organize a set time for you and the recipient. Most if not all instant messanger programs offer direct file transfer options built in (such as AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc.), and this 1-to-1 transfer ensures that no parts of a multispan get lost in the transfer and that the most efficient use of bandwidth is achieved (you send as fast as they can receive, and neither your mail server nor theirs will retain a copy even temporarily, possibly violating any disk quotas either of you might have. It's relatively fast, it will take you approximately 25 minutes transferring at 100kb/sec (speeds not uncommon for Cable/DSL/T1 line speeds) and if worse comes to worst, it will take about 6 and a half hours if he (or you, or both) are on 56k modem. All of these instant messenger programs support resumable transfers, so it's not lost time if something goes awry with the transfer halfway through. That's just another option to think about. Let me know what your options are after speaking to the other party, and I'll work with you further on selecting the best method. Thank you for your question, and I'm happy to answer it. skermit-ga