how do I compress a video file?

[ballrific]

ive been trying to compress this avi file to post on you tube; im using winrar to try to compress but it just seems to be making copies of the same file and it's not any smaller. what am I doing wrong? It gives it a new icon, etc.. as if it's a new file but when I click on properties, it's the same size...

 

[MilkmanDan]

I do mine more or less like this. I'm sure there's an easier way, but it works pretty well and cuts the files down to about a tenth of their start size.

 

[Fried JJ Pickles]

If you use a normal compression tool like gzip or 7z or winzip, you won't notice much of a difference, as most video files are already compressed.

If you need a lot of compression, you need to transcode it to another video file format that's lossy but looks pretty good.

That's to say that you probably need to do more than simply compress since it's likely already compressed if a zip file won't make it smaller.

 

[ballrific]

yeah, guess I'm an idiot b/c that didn't work either. Anyone have step by step instructions for shrinking an avi/windows media file?

 

[fhetw]

1)There really shouldnt be a reason that a 10minute video is larger than 1024mb (youtube upload limits)
2)winrar is just a file archiving system. are you sure you can even upload .rar or .zip files to youtube? never tried
3)as stated above virtualdub + divx are great free tools.

 

[ballrific]

yeah, these are only about 350mb but from past experiences, that takes like 3 hrs to upload to youtube. Ive shrunk one that size before to around 30mb, I just can't remember how I did it for the life of me...