Converting to a smaller, high quality video format ?

Hello all. I have a video folder that has a very large collection of hundreds of videos and nearly all in windows media format. The size of the folder is now exceeding 75 GB. I am wanting to know what is the best format to convert these videos to a smaller size while keeping the highest quality possible.

 

The best free tool for the job is MeGui.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/
http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/MeGUI

convert your fiiles in mp4 or Avi, and use x264 as video encoder

Panagiotis

 

I recommend x264's h264. AFAIK the only formats which support it is MP4 and MKV. AVI also supports it but not natively, need some hacks. There's the CLI version here:

hxxp://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

If you don't like CLI (like me ) you can use lots of free available GUIs. Like TX264 for example. Available here:

hxxp://sourceforge.net/projects/tx264/

I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think FFmpeg also uses x264 for h264 encodings, which is also a CLI, you can get it here (for Windows only):

hxxp://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

And of course, there are lots of GUIs for it as well. I personally use XMedia Recode. Available here:

hxxp://www.xmedia-recode.de/download.html

P.S. : Use CRF/Constant Quality mode if you aim for quality and efficiency. It will adjust the bitrate automatically according to the complexity of your videos. Most people usually use a value in the range of 18 to 24 (lower value = better quality). Otherwise, use 2-pass CBR, but you need some experiments to determine bitrates for different types of videos.

 

I have a wondershare video converter and I think it will convert to that format...thanks for the info.

 

From Windows media format, I will assume they are all in wmv format. Wmv itself is a highly compressed format and it is Microsoft's propitiatory compression codec developed as a competitor to mpeg-4 ASP (divx) and the latest v9 as a competitor to mpeg-4 AVC (H264). You will not get any benefit in reconverting the videos to H264 or any other format.

 

You will if using x264. WMV (codec) is less efficient.

 

The benefits will be marginal and as wmv is a lossy compression format, so it is not recommended to reconvert it to another format, as the resultant video quality will be poor.

 

Old thread, but probably still relevant:

hxxp://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=106918

Rule #23 of media conversion: Never re-encode your media files if it has been encoded unless you have to do it.

P.S. : I dare you to encode a lossless video to x264's h264 and WMV9 with the same bitrate.

 

It is not a question of which codec is superior, I prefer H264 myself, the OP has video files already encoded in wmv, for him it does not make any sense to re-encode them to another format because he will not get much size reduction and his video quality will suffer. My advice to the OP will be to leave his video files as they are.

 

I agree with Raza0007.

I was in a similar position as OP. I had numerous in-frequently accessed videos. My hard drive could not keep up. I tested re-encoding (with a variety of software and codecs), but the benefits were minimal - and many times the new videos had audio-video sync problems.

It's just not worth the effort.

My suggestion to the OP is to invest in a new hard drive (for storage purposes) and possibly an external hard drive dock (if the computer has limited drive ports).

 

Depends on the input quality I guess. If you convert a video with 7000kbps bitrate WMV9 WMV to an x264's h264 MP4 for example, you can go as low as 2000kbps and still not getting too noticeable quality drop, depends on the complexity of the video. Hence I recommend CRF mode. Agree if the WMV videos are already encoded in low bitrate and/or quality, gain nothing indeed.