It's probably too soon, but you could have a look at xvid.

Ian G.

Another option, if you are using XP, is to download Microsoft's free Movie Maker 2.

Though it's not the powerhouse Video Factory is, it's a very good video editor.

Export your movie as a DV-AVI from Video Factory. Then import the AVI into Movie Maker.

One of the nice features in Movie Maker is that, when you export your video to a WMV file, you can designate how large you want the file to be and the program will squeeze it down as small as you want it. This is great for getting that file size down so that you can post it on a web site with, say, a 10 meg limit.

I believe I tried this, but for some reason the audio didn't come through when I played the AVI in MovieMaker. I can try it again.

Thanks!

Gary

This is a bit embarassing. I downloaded the free DIVX encoder and player and installed it, but I can't find the encoder on my machine! I can see the player and the encoder config settings, but I don't see an encoder program to run. Am I being dense?

Thanks,

Gary

You can't find what isn't there. The free version of DivX doesn't come with the standalone "Dr. Divx" encoder.

However, you can use Video Factory to encode to DivX instead.

Click on:
1) Make Video
2) Write your Movie to Disk
3) Advanced Render
4) Select "Video for Windows (*.avi) from the "Save as" dropdown box.
5) Custom button
6) "Video" Tab at the bottom of the dialog box
7) Select "DivX 5.05" from the "Video Format" dropdown box.

Obviously, there are a lot of other things to adjust as well but this will get you started.

>Am I being dense?
No more so than the rest of us!

Try make move/write your move to file , select video for windows as the format and click on advanced render. Select video for windows (again!) as "the save as type" and click on custom. Select the video tab at the bottom and you'll see the option of selecting the video format. Finally, you get to select the DivX codec.


Ian G.

Thanks! I'll try it tonight.

Gary

I haven't tried this but you might like to take a look at this

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tools.php?tool=356#comments

It worked! I'm a bit disappointed in the quality though. The file size is half of wme8, but the quality is noticably lower. Is it because I'm using the free version of DIVX? I set quality on best as well.

Thanks,

Gary

All things considered, most compression codecs these days produce pretty similar results when compressing given material to similar file sizes. If you compress to a smaller file size you'll get lower quality. This is going to be true no matter what format or codec you choose. Your statement "the file size is half of ..." should clue you in that you'll probably only have half the quality.

Chienworks,

I guess I understand that. I had heard that DIVX quality was excellent. Heving encoded with DIVX using it's highest quality setting, I was expecting a larger file size (hoping for just slightly smaller than a wme8 encoding).

Are there other settings other than "Best" when encoding with DIVX that will give me a larger size and better quality.

I really don't want to render to a super-large AVI file just to load into MovieMaker to get to wme9.

Gary

Since you don't want to make a big AVI and import it into Movie Maker 2, you could always just open up your WMA 8 file in Movie Maker 2 (it should be able to read it) and make a WMA 9 file out of that!

I'm a big fan of using the best tools and the simplest solution.