best options video compression to web?

flaagan

so i want to put some vids of my unreal work online...
i've got vid capture from FRAPS that looks decent / great, but if i feed it through the default settings for window movie maker it really kills the quality of the vid.. any suggestions on settings that'll tweak this?.. or other apps that dont require a rediculous amount of tweaking for a good output..? i think i can get at tools to make quicktime vids... so any pointers for that would work as well.
audio's not really an issue (only one vid would even really need it), but pointers along that line wouldnt hurt either.. the big issue is keeping the quality of the video, since some of this stuff will be particle effects work.

cholden

I've had the most success with 3gp converter for quicktime format, it's free, and what I use to crunch vids down small to put on my PSP
http://www.nurs.or.jp/~calcium/3gpp/
that's a japanese site, but you should be able to figure it out.
Before I used that, WMV compression for Adobe Premier has always been a favorite of mine for releasing video on the internet.
Both of these have a lot of quality settings for you to experiement with and see what's best for you.

Gmanx

Have you tried virtualdub? It's free, and will compress with divx xvid and other codecs. Output is .avi only, but the compression/quality is impressive.

Slum

I love STOIK Video Converter. Can be slow, but has loads of options.

http://www.stoik.com/products/svc/index.html

Faucet

Unfortunately FRAPS can't spend much CPU time to encode stuff while you're running a game. As a result you either have huge files with nice image quality or small files with absolute crappy quality. The FRAPS FAQ recommends using Virtualdub to compress the large videos. It's free and since quality is all in the codec (not the program using the codec) it's just as good as any other program as far as quality goes.

As for codecs, XviD or DivX are both pretty damned good. Microsoft MPEG4 is also pretty good and it'll reach the non-techsavy folks who don't want to install a new codec.

I don't know of any free programs that'll encode Quicktimes, but Google might. I recommend either their MPEG4 or Sorenson 3 codecs. Quicktime Pro will convert image sequences to Quicktime (maybe AVIs to QT too, but I've never tried it) That's ~$30 last I checked.

Eric Chadwick

IMHO, the free Sorenson codec is crap. You need to pay for the good Sorenson that the movie studios use for their Apple.com trailers... then you get 2-pass VBR (Variable Bit Rate) which is a huge improvement.

First pass of the compressor analyzes which parts of the video are slow-moving, and allocates more bits to the fast sections, so the bitrate can vary. 2nd pass then encodes the actual video file.

If you can't afford Sorenson, then look for codecs that allow 2-pass VBR. Might be hard to find for free, but it's amazing what the difference looks like! And the file size savings is huge too.

Also, to pick bitrates, it helps to examine what the big boys do. Like Faucet says, QuickTime Pro is a good investment. It lets me check the video stats so I can see framerate, image size, bitrate, codecs used, etc.

Eric Chadwick

Here's a good article comparing recent codecs.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1544886,00.asp
(but they avoid 2-pass VBR, go figure)