Thread: AVI to ... Converter

Anyone know a free converter? It'd be nice if it could also merge videos...
Plus, what format is good to convert to? I want nice quality, but able to upload it on Youtube :P

Handbrake to convert from AVI to MP4 or MKV. Though avi is a perfectly fine container.

http://handbrake.fr/

Thanks kanati, although my AVI are about 4gig in size for about... 10 minutes. This is why I need some serious compression going on lol

Probably not what you're looking for, but I recently needed to convert AVI files to dvd and I found a program called DVD Flick. Worked great for me.

Ah. That's where you are mistaken then. AVI is a container. As is mp4 and mkv. The containers have video IN them using different forms of compression. It sounds like yours are full frame uncompressed video WITHIN the avi.

If you re-encode them using xvid, indeo or pretty much ANYTHING that uses good compression (you'll need to know a bit about bitrates and such as video encoding isn't the simplest thing to do), your avi's will be much smaller without losing a whole lot of quality.

Regardless, the above program, Handbrake, is good and free. Give it a shot.

Thanks kanati, can you lead me in the right direction regarding learning something about video compression?

This takes forever

I remember someone saying about figuring out how to offload some of the processing power to your GPU?


Current convert:
about 7gig AVI to MPEG 2 with the following characteristics (mostly default cause I wanted to see what happened)

MPEG-2 Standard
Audio Bitrate : 128
Video Bitrate : 1150
Sample Rate : 44100
Frame Rate : 30
Channels : Stereo
1366 x 768 ratio

Down to around 50 MB lol

if you have a newer video card then both nvidia and ati have options for using the gpu for converting which is very fast.

But... and this is a big but... The videos produced are sometimes faulty and quality isn't exactly the best. It's still evolving and it'll get better. I'd stay with handbrake or tools of it's like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nPsBwMivCk

That video has some faulty information but it's reasonably good and tells you about the absolute basics.

http://www.videohelp.com/guides

Thanks Kanati, I've got an NVidia GTX260 (relatively new, or so I thought... isn't 29x their latest series?).

ATI's converter is free and is installed with the drivers (or maybe with a separate download... can't remember how I got it installed and tested it), but nvidia's solution appears to cost (maybe that means it works better than the last time I checked it out).

http://store.nvidia.com/store/nvidia...=1266973824161

If you have 30 bux and want to try it, lemme know how it works.