On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 12:00:47AM -0600, Penguin Lover Michael Sullivan squawked: > I recorded a two-hour movie off telivision this evening. I watched it > and it looks fine, but the file size is really big: 4.3GB. Is this > normal? As I said, the file was recorded by mythtv; it has a .nuv > extension. I didn't recognize that extension, so I looked at its > properties in nautilus. Properties claims that it's an MPEG video file, > but that seems rather large for a two-hour mpeg. I used to download > two-hour movies off of gtk-gnutella that were around 650MB. Is there > anything I can do to get the file size down so that it can fit on a CD? > My wife's birthday is a week from today, and although I bought the movie > on DVD for her (and actually have it hidden in the bedroom ATM), she > doesn't know that and she would like it backed up to CD, but 4.3GB won't > fit on a CD. Any hints? >
just because it is MPEG it doesn't tell you anything. The size really depends a lot on the frame rate and resolution. For comparison: The movie Hero is 99 minutes long. VCD encode to 352x240 using MPEG1 at 30fps gives 1.1G total (2 VCDs). And my guess is that your file is in MPEG2, which, according to the moving picture experts group, is for "transport, video and audio standards for broadcast-quality television." At broadcast quality NTSC you should expect 3Mbps * 3600s/hr * 2 hr / 8 = 2.6GB. If you have PAL, then it goes up to roughly 5Mbps * 3600 * 2/8 = 4.4GB. So it is not unexpected. http://erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/digital-video/mpeg2.html If you want it on a CD, it would have to be rather poor quality. It would do you better to try to burn it on a DVD if you can. But, if you must burn it to CD, try 'ffmpeg' and set the output type to vcd. You might be able to get it down to 2 discs, instead of 7. As a side note: it can't be that hard to "procrastinate" burning the disc for a week..., or you can pretend to burn it... and only burn the first 20 minutes. Do you think she's actually going to watch the burnt disc to make sure you have a complete copy on it? There are multiple ways of solving this problem. =) HTH W -- I am not a physics major. I am not a physics major. I will never be a physics major. I never will want to be a physics major. I can never be a physics major. ~Daniel Jonathan Peng Sortir en Pantoufles: up 57 days, 23:20 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
