> I don't have any way of generating DivX or Xvid.

Lots of freeware tools can make it.  One GUI tool that I find particularly 
easy to use is Xvid4PSP, lots of presets so no need to fiddle about with 
command line options if you don't want to.

> Since my camcorder records onto 8cm DVDs which are reputedly playable on a 
> normal DVD player, I'm presuming it generates MPEG-2. (I'm not sure how to 
> actually get that off the disk though.)

There are much better compression algorithms (ie way lower bitrate for same 
quality) than the DVD-standard available.  Read the instructions, I'm sure 
it will tell you how to get the video on to your computer.

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Invisible wrote:
>> There's a 1 GB limit.
> 
> What, on YouTube itself?

Of course, that's the upload limit. The server would re-encode it to a small
(in terms of pixels) 15fps FLV which would surely be a much smaller file.

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Invisible wrote:
> how to actually get that off the disk though.)

A standard DVD's ".VOB" files are mpeg of whatever appropriate stripe.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I don't have any way of generating DivX or Xvid. But IIRC, last time I 
> tried, no matter what settings I used the picture came out horrifically 
> blurry. I'd down the quality settings higher and higher, and the file 
> got larger and larger, but there was no visible improvement in the 
> picture.

  Then all those divx and xvid videos out there which look just fine must
have been created by magic. ;)

> Since my camcorder records onto 8cm DVDs which are reputedly playable on 
> a normal DVD player, I'm presuming it generates MPEG-2. (I'm not sure 
> how to actually get that off the disk though.)

  If you are able to play the DVD videos with your computer, it's rather
trivial to copy the video/audio streams from the DVD to eg. an AVI file.
For example mencoder can do that. There are probably also many Windows
programs which can also do that.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> how to actually get that off the disk though.)
> 
> A standard DVD's ".VOB" files are mpeg of whatever appropriate stripe.

Well, that's what I've heard, but aren't they multiplexed in an unusual way?

Also, certainly on the DVDs I've looked at, the video data is split into 
several VOB files, seemingly at random. How do I join them back together?

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>> I don't have any way of generating DivX or Xvid. But IIRC, last time I 
>> tried, no matter what settings I used the picture came out horrifically 
>> blurry. I'd down the quality settings higher and higher, and the file 
>> got larger and larger, but there was no visible improvement in the 
>> picture.
> 
>   Then all those divx and xvid videos out there which look just fine must
> have been created by magic. ;)

If I ever come across one, I'll let you know. ;-)

Basically I've never seen a video on the Internet that doesn't look 
horribly mutilated. (Presumably due to the bandwidth constrains it has 
to fit through...) DVDs, on the other hand, almost always look just fine.

The only exception was when I downloaded Star Wrek. (But that took an 
entire day to download.)

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scott wrote:
>> I don't have any way of generating DivX or Xvid.
> 
> Lots of freeware tools can make it.  One GUI tool that I find 
> particularly easy to use is Xvid4PSP, lots of presets so no need to 
> fiddle about with command line options if you don't want to.

At one point I had an encoder for either DivX or Xvid, I can't remember 
which one. It seemingly had 30,000 options, and none of them seemed to 
improve the image quality...

>> Since my camcorder records onto 8cm DVDs which are reputedly playable 
>> on a normal DVD player, I'm presuming it generates MPEG-2. (I'm not 
>> sure how to actually get that off the disk though.)
> 
> There are much better compression algorithms (ie way lower bitrate for 
> same quality) than the DVD-standard available.  Read the instructions, 
> I'm sure it will tell you how to get the video on to your computer.

I'll believe it when I see it. So far DVD is the only compressed video 
I've ever seen that doesn't look visibly mutilated by the compression 
process.

(E.g., if I take some POV-Ray video data and compress it - using every 
codec I could find an encoder for - it always looks awful. If I ask my 
DVD maker program to make a DVD out of it, it looks reasonably good. 
[Although never as good as a commercial DVD - don't ask me why.])

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> I'll believe it when I see it.

Download something from this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

I recommend the Robotica one as a quick test.

> (E.g., if I take some POV-Ray video data and compress it - using every 
> codec I could find an encoder for - it always looks awful.

Funny, I regularly encode POV stills using xvid4psp into MP4 format for my 
PS3, it looks way better than any DVD.

> [Although never as good as a commercial DVD - don't ask me why.])

Add motion blur?  Also the DVD standard allows different bitrates, make sure 
you are using the highest one for small animations.

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> If I ever come across one, I'll let you know. ;-)
>
> Basically I've never seen a video on the Internet that doesn't look 
> horribly mutilated. (Presumably due to the bandwidth constrains it has to 
> fit through...) DVDs, on the other hand, almost always look just fine.

DVDs have a bandwidth of around 10 Mbit/s, but they use an old compression 
technology.  Using modern codecs on faster processors you can get higher 
quality than DVD through 2-5 Mbit/s bandwidth.  A friend of mine watches NFL 
football over the net, in HD quality, at 2mbit/s.  The quality is awesome (I 
plugged my laptop into the TV), way better than any normal TV feed or DVD. 
I was quite surprised how the quality was that good at such a low bitrate - 
but it was using almost 100% of one of my CPUs continuously!

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scott wrote:

> DVDs have a bandwidth of around 10 Mbit/s, but they use an old 
> compression technology.

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are old, no argument about that. ;-)

> Using modern codecs on faster processors you 
> can get higher quality than DVD through 2-5 Mbit/s bandwidth.

You would hope so. It's just that I have yet to see such a thing. Every 
codec I have ever tried has produced horrid results, with the exception 
of MPEG-1 at really high bitrate, or whatever my DVD authoring software 
is using (presumably MPEG-2, no idea what settings).

> A friend 
> of mine watches NFL football over the net, in HD quality, at 2mbit/s.  
> The quality is awesome (I plugged my laptop into the TV), way better 
> than any normal TV feed or DVD. I was quite surprised how the quality 
> was that good at such a low bitrate - but it was using almost 100% of 
> one of my CPUs continuously!

Now, see, actually *getting* 2 Mbit/sec of real data over the Internet 
seems like an impressive feat on its own...

(My Internet connection is supposed to deliver 8 Mbit/sec, but you never 
actually get anything approaching that. Plus you're probably talking 
about the bitrate of the codec; there's all the framing overhead and so 
forth on top of that to consider - although presumably if it's streaming 
it'll be UDP, not TCP...)

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