I'm recording some videos, and they get too big (almost 1gb for 14 min of video).
Anyone knows a good program to convert this video to another format (to make it smaller) ?
It is currently in .MPG.
I want to upload them to youtube.

I take my recordings from fraps and then convert them with windows movie maker.

I go from about 30gb of video from fraps for an hours worth of video to about 3gb of video for an hours worth. When I cut it up into 10 min chunks it is even smaller to upload to youtube.

OK, I'll give it a try.

VLC can convert video to various formats.

I think you might find this link useful: http://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/
Perfect timing as they have got a Halloween promo and the video converter is free :)

nice tip, just got it!
I'm always converting videos to my ipod.

I recently came across this tutorial, seemed like a nice tutorial and perhaps it can help you.

Actually there is another app on Halloween promo for free as well (scroll to bottom):
http://www.snowfoxsoft.com/special-offer/halloween-promotion-2011.html

mplayer2 for demuxing the audio, anything else that can demux video/audio streams also works
x264 for video
oggenc2 for audio
mkvtoolnix for muxing to Matroska container

assuming the source video has wav audio (if it has mp3 or some other lossy audio just skip to video encoding)
mplayer2 video.mpg -dumpaudio -dumpfile audio.wav
sometimes dumpaudio doesn't work as expected but decoding to wav works always
mplayer2 video.mpg -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:file=audio.wav

encode audio to Vorbis at q5
oggenc2 -q5 audio.wav

encode video with x264 using crf mode
x264 video.mpg --preset slow --tune film --crf 20 -o video.264
use higher crf value if you want smaller filesize at lower quality

mux video and audio
mkvmerge video.264 audio.ogg -o video.mkv
if the source had mp3 or some other lossy audio then use the source audio for muxing
mkvmerge video.264 -D -S -B -T -M video.mpg -o video.mkv

-D = no video
-S = no subtitles
-B = no buttons
-T = no tags
-M = no attachments



MeGUI if you need GUI for the tools
also MeGUI guide at and [url=http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/]MeWiki

Whatever tool you are using for capturing the video footage, you should have options of various codecs to pick from. You can take them one by one and google them to find out which is going to eat a lot of space and which is going to be a bit easier on the details.


Also, for video capturing I really recommend you use: http://www.virtualdub.org/
It's open source and while it may do a lot more than you would need it to, once you get used to it, it's an amazing tool.

I would recommend you also try m2ts video converter which is free to download trial software.
http://www.freem2tsconverter.com/

World class necro, Mate!

Handbrake I find to be easy as well as free.

Use bandicam, it encode the video while you are recording it and doesn't consume very much :)