Compressing movie files

easterhay

easterhay

little green rosetta
Hello all - I have a dozen or so movies (.avi and .mpg) I want to back up onto CD to free up space on my hd. Like a mad, mad fool I didn't opt for a Superdrive when I bought my machine (OsX 10.3.9, 12" iBook, 60GB hd) and now it's not a financial option. Curses.
The files are about the 690 - 700MB mark and won't fit on the CD-Rs I have. I have tried archiving them and creating a compressed dmg but no joy. Any clues as to how to squeeze them onto a CD? I'd like to go for a hardware remedy but I live in a pretty poor country and all those options are way out of my league at the moment, as are expensive software solutions, more's the pity.
This would also help me with backing up my many vast photos I can't bring myself to shrink or discard.
Thanks in advance.
 
You have four options:

1. Re-encode the movies using a lower bitrate. This will sacrifice some audio/video quality, but it may be the best option anyway. I recommend using ffmpegX for your re-encoding needs.

2. Split each movie into multiple files so you can put it across two CDs with an app like Explicit.

3. Compress the files with something like StuffIt. I don't recommend even trying this, though. It doesn't usually reduce the size of movies by much, since movies are already highly compressed. The same goes for other compression forms, like zip or dmg.

4. "Overburn" your CDs. Overburning is a method to squeeze more than the normal maximum onto a CD. This is done by writing data to the CD in places that are usually reserved for error-correction metadata. Thus, overburned discs are more prone to errors. You can overburn discs using Firestarter FX.

Hope this helps.
 
Thank you. I have downloaded your recommendations and will try them out.
Cheers for the help
 
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