How to Compress AVI Video Files

Whenever we take video’s using our Personal Digital Camera‘s, the final size of the video files is quite huge and on an average it stands at around 100Mb per minute of a video in HD Quality. This makes the uploading of the same video to youtube a very hard task along with the slow broadband speeds and large file sizes. Recently i recorded a video of 1 minute & 11 seconds size, which had a file size of 132mb which cannot be easily uploaded nor downloaded while you are on a USB data card or Mobile phone internet connection. Hence, its compulsory to compress the video to a smaller file size and make sure that the quality is not reduced at the same time because having a blurry video is as good as having no video stored for future views.

Microsoft offers a excellent software which would help you in encoding the video files and compressing them called as the Windows Media Encoder 9 which would allow you to encode audio and video content in Windows Media Video (WMV) format using either the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version. This not only saves the file size but also maintains the quality of the video files. All the video files are stored in multiple frames and normal web cam recorded videos are stored at 24 fps ie at 24 frames per second mode. While the HD Videos recorded would have very high number of frames per second along with high width and height of the frames, making every pixel clear and perfect in looks. Install the software from this URL.

Once you install the software and run it for the first time, you will be shown with a wizard which would help you in getting started.

The New Session would display different options, from which you need to select the ‘Convert a File’ option and click on ok. Next the Windows Media Encoder would ask you the Source File & Destination File location which would be the location where the Output File would be stored. Once done, click on the Next Button.

Next you will be given with a list of Encoding Options which are the most important part of using this software. Here you have two different things to select ie the Audio & Video part for which you need to set the quality and standards, Its recommended that you should not touch the Audio options because Audio does not take much file size, hence it does not matter much decreasing its quality for reducing the size. You should check out the Video Encoding options in detail.

If your video is of HD Quality, its recommended that you set a minimum of 640×480 resolution for the video and click on continue which would Encode the whole video in a few minutes, generally based on the file size.

Once the whole compression job is completed, you will be given with a results section which would be useful in comparing the data with the original file. My original video file of 132mb got converted to 21mb size saving around 85% and the quality was maintained at around 80% which is decent enough. This is a decent enough software available for free and useful if you are planning to upload these videos to video hosting sites because they would have a small viewing area, hence a bit lower quality video would also look great there in.