Good / easy video compression software?

[Rhino]

Evening kids.

A lot of the torrents and Shiite you acquire is normally boiled down to about 350mb for an hour (less 15mins worth of commercials) episode. 720p eps are 800mb - 1.x gig.

I'm recording stuff myself like the GP and various other shows but my terrabyte drive is still filling up

What out there is good that you're using?

Have used Super Copyright, Super (C), Super - whatever you want to call it for conversions before but I reduced the res by 1/2 and ended up with a bigger file!? wtf mate!

Just tried having a look at Handbrake (5 minutes)... and it's throwing errors so I thought I'd post up for suggestions while I research them. Looks half way to what I would want though.

Ideally, something like DVDshrink, where I can just input my target file size, and codec and off it goes. Handbrake seems to do that if I can get around the errors.

I'm recording out of Media Portal (It's better than the proprietary stuff I got Klink)
but big files. 1hr episode is 2.8 gig. I want to get it down to 350ish.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Talk to me Goose...

[MisterP]

I think from memory, media Portal stores its files in MPEG 2 standard, so you pretty much have all the file compression apps to play with.

Handbrake is really good for DVD's as it looks for the VIDEO_TS structure, Ive never had any luck running it for flat MPEG2 files.
Personally, I dont like Super as the user interface is messy and clunky, but functionality is good (I use it for WMV stuff).
VirtualDubMPEG2 or VirtualDUBmod is the best and most flexible (free) app out there for video encoding, but you need a fairly good understanding of the whole video encoding to set all the options and filters sucessfully.

For a complete all-in-one, I like using autoGK as its click and queue. You have some control over what the quality is like as a basic setting, or under advanced you can tweak it to whatever you like.
AutoGK is basically a nice front end for VirtualdubMod that pre-sets all the settings youd normally have to dig around in the app and streams for.

As a side, Ive found that Media Portal (FFDShow) sometimes stores non-standard MPEG2 files. No idea what the actual issue is (maybe some setting in Media Portal or FFDShow) but Ive had to run then through something like Video Redo or DVRMS toolkit/mencoder to 'fix' them.

Hope it helps.

[DaveR6]

not to hijack this thread as its kinda related...

but what would people recommend as freeware for converting x264 (mp4) encoded video to xvid?

[D'Artagnan]

I use Staxrip. It is just a nice frontend to do all your converting needs and produces excellent h264 or xvid/divx conversions.

Get it here. When you first run it, it will download all the bits and pieces you need.

[Rhino]

Oh my goodness.

Found an awesome tool for converting recorded stuff. And it will strip ads too.

MCEbuddy. Check it!
MCEBuddy

MrP. MP only outputs as mpg in 1.0.0
Later releases, 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 only export transport streams (apparently the mpgs were buggy)