Best video compression software that is free?

[ZeroX]

i was able to take a 20mb video clip and make it a 18.5mb rar file, so like i said yes it does compress the file, try it yourself and see, but your not going to see that much of a difference. but if you want to really squeeze as much as you can i would use .rar.

but if he is able to compress down to cd size with divx, yes there is no need for .rar

i don't see what the big fight is about here?

 

[Chankama]

Personally I use DivX. I don't really see the point of winrar'ing it after that. I guess given the file in question, you might see "some" compression improvement.

compression is a lossless operation. Where as, video encoding is not necessarily lossless. One would hope that a good codec finds the optimally efficient encoding possible (in terms of size). So it doesn't make sense that a lossless compression on top of that would find a smaller file.

In the event it does, it means that the codec used could be "improved upon" slightly. I think in these days, codecs are pretty **** good to the point that a further compression operation would only yield minimal results.

 

[office politics]

i use virtualdub to compress all my video files; www.virtualdub.org it allows you to compress both video and audio with a selection of different codecs; including divx & xvid.

 

[Osiris]

I use ImToo but it aint free, wink*.....