[ILUG] OT video archiving

[kae verens]

Frank Duignan wrote:

>We bought a digital video camera a year ago and I find that the volume of
>data from it is becoming unwieldy.  The camera produces AVI files that are huge
>approx 13GB / hour.  Compressing to DVD reduces this down to about 3-4GB.
>Two questions:
>1) Is it worth preserving the AVI's for that extra bit of data they
>might contain?
>2) Any suggestions for archiving all this stuff for > 10 years?  I
>suspect that this
>will be best achived by rolling across ever larger disk drives over
>time but maybe
>there's a better approach. 
>
>Note : Can't fit an hour long AVI file on to even a double layer DVD (9GB limit)
>
>All adivce appreciated.
>f.
>  
>
If it's the memory you're after, and diamond-sharp quality is not an 
issue, then try compressing the videos down.

For example, I always compress my films to a maximum of 320x240 in mono, 
using a divx codec, which means you can fit a 2 hour film into between 
200-350 MB.

Save this into a file called "reencode"

mencoder "$1" -oac lavc -vf hqdn3d=2:1:2 -vf scale -zoom -xy 320 -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts 
abitrate=64:vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=250:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:\
mbcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=1 -o "$2" \
&& \
mencoder "$1" -oac lavc -vf hqdn3d=2:1:2 -vf scale -zoom -xy 320 -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts 
abitrate=64:vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=250:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:\
mbcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=2 -o "$2"

then, when you want to compress a file (file.avi), do it like this:
./reencode file.avi compressed.avi

Kae