Mass Compression

[Macman1993]

Hi, I need some type of application that can do mass compression, I'm talking about turning something from 120gb to about 40 (hopefully less), it needs to be able to do this to .mp4 movies. Please help because I'm going back to boarding school and they don't allow movies, I want to be able to keep a backup file that doesn't take 120gbs.

 

[thegrifman]

I'm no expert on compression but I think just about the only thing you'd get to compress by that amount would be a 120GB text file. As an mp4 the movie has already undergone one form of compression so if it compresses at all it's not going to be by much. Your best bet is to find some other way to back them up.

 

[Macman1993]

Are there any video formats that will easily compress to the size I want?

 

[Oryan]

Not really. Once you compress something once (which all common video formats are), it becomes much more difficult to compress it again. If you don't want to take up that much space, why not take so many movies or put some on an external drive. You could also burn them to a data DVD to get them off your hd.

 

[thegrifman]

Are there any video formats that will easily compress to the size I want?

I think the only thing that will get you there if you go that route is to transcode them to, yeah maybe another format, but more importantly a smaller visual size. Lowering the resolution of the movie should take a decent chunk off the total amount of space it consumes. You'd have to play with the sizing though to find one that gives you an acceptable drop in hdd space consumed while maintaining a decent visual size. For instance, I ripped Planet Terror and encoded it using Handbrake to fit on my iPod touch and at a resolution of 640x368 encoded in H.264 it comes in at 1.23GB for a 1 hour and 45 minute movie.

 

[Macman1993]

Not really. Once you compress something once (which all common video formats are), it becomes much more difficult to compress it again. If you don't want to take up that much space, why not take so many movies or put some on an external drive. You could also burn them to a data DVD to get them off your hd.

They are on an external drive, I want a backup of the backup so if I lost the main copy I still have all my vids, but I dont want it to be as huge. I want this because my school doesn't allow movies and they will delete mine if they find them. Also last year I had a compression application, it compressed things to 1/4 their original size but for some reason doesn't do that anymore. Just like everything else it makes things about 5mb's smaller.

 

[swwack91]

like other people said... you can decrease the resolution and most of all decrease the bit rate.

if this is a last ditch effort for you - maybe losing some crispness in the video is worth it.

i suggest dropping the bit rate down to somewhere around 512kbps for video and 112kbps for audio.

that should shave a lot of size off of those files.... assuming that they're high quality now...