Need Help: Converting An .AVI Video File

[bmurphyfl]

Last weekend, I saw Lambchop in concert and used my digital camera to film them doing a rare performance of "Soaky In the Pooper" during the encore. The video is about 4 minutes long and 175MB. It's an .avi file.

I'd like to upload it to YouTube but YouTube has a 100MB limit. I've seen plenty of concert videos from other people on YouTube that run for about 4 minutes. So, I'm guessig they are doing something to convert the video to a format that shrinks the size of the file.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?

Thanks.

[techin]

The easiest simplest solution on a Windows XP machine would be to use Windows Movie Maker. Allows for some simple editing too. But there are other free video conversion programs out there.

http://www.videohelp.com

has some useful articles, guides, and tutorials as well.


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[Fleetwood Mac #1]

VirtualDub (http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/stable/) does it for me and it's free.

[bmurphyfl]

I finally got around to downloading VirtualDub to compress my avi files down to a size that would be usable for YouTube. Thanks for the tip.

However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to compress the video. I can open the video in VirtualDub and open the dialog box for Select Video Compression. However, when I choose a type of compression and click "OK", nothing happens.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Fleetwood Mac #1]

You can also compress the audio (Full processing mode, Compression, select and OK). When done go to File, Save as AVI, name the file and Save.

Keep this in mind when converting for Youtube (from their upload page):
Videos saved with the following settings convert the best:
MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
320x240 resolution
MP3 audio
30 frames per second framerate

If you can't find the necessary codecs, download from here (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_Lite_Mega_Codec_Pack.htm).

Hope this helps.