hey Storebay..that encoder you used is part of a hardware package?..or is it a standalone software encoder?
i just downloaded a clip out of curiousity to see how it looked...yeah that vcd is real poor quality though...i recorded mines at dvd standard and 2hrs gave me 6gb of video but i can compress it to a lower quality and u still cant really make out the difference..i know 3.5gb is still a lot but maybe i can cut it up into bout 4 pieces..let me know if you want me to upload it..ill have to go dig out my Flash Ftp from one of my other pc's..also what bout that copyright thing?...is this illegal..not as if i really care though lol
Hello Feliziano,
Based on your other post I gather that you are using the Hauppage 350 card, which is an excellent product. And as you said the MPEG2 file of size 3.5GB for 2 hrs of video still looks like standard TV. Now although all of that is correct, it still does not really address the key parameter in the main issue of sharing video via the internet. Of course the key parameter is file-size, and the main issue/criteria is the highest quality video for the smallest file size. In the post I did mention or rather imply that I have high quality MPEG2 files of the halves. Incidentally the total size for the game is roughly 3.2 GB. The problem is that file-size is way too large for the typical user. Note that the total size of the VCD files is less than 1 GB, and based on posts on other forums users seem to be comfortable with a file size of 700MB. In an earlier posts I discussed thetime it takes to download, etc. In addition it takes longer to upload than to download. Did you check how long it would take to upload a 3.5GB file? Please check, I think that it is useful info to other readers, and I would also like to get an idea of the connection speed of others. The other issue of file size is the cost of hosting a large file on a server that is connected to the internet backbone. A file can be hosted on a personal server, with a static IP, (low cost) but then that server will be transferring at upload speeds; thereby not enabling very fast downloads (7 hrs compared to 30 min for the same size file).
The videos were recorded with a hardware codec to an avi file. Software is then used to encode to the desired type of file: VCD, MPEG1, MPEG2 etc. If one intends to heavily edit the recorded video, then it is best to have the avi file. If you can compress the 3.5 GB to roughly 1 GB and you think that the quality is comparable to the posted file then I would like to take a look at it. Actually it need not be the whole file, let us say 15 minutes of videos compressed to 1/4 (one quarter) of the present size ( (1/8) fractional size from the 3.5GB file.). My guess is that you will find the following. That additional processing, or compression of the recorded MPEG2 file leads to a poor quality video. You can also look at xvid files that were obtained from recorded MPEG2 files. The posted VCD file is the best possible quality video for the file size. Now I have not tried compressing using divx4 on the avi file, but I might in the future.
As far as I know what we are doing is legal. The Supreme Court recently clarified which business practices are acceptable and did not rule on the technology.