Celestia Forums

Capturing movies for myself is no problem. However - what if we want to share them? What codec / format is recommended? There are so many choices! Is 640 x 480 size acceptable or should I stick with a smaller size?

Any info or tips are welcome!
Ron A

I would use DivX...It has the best compression...

Personally, I prefer MPEG or MPEG2 if there are subtle movements in
the scene (such as stars moving or planets turning slowly), since DivX tends to blur and discard colors too often.

if using DivX I would also recommend:

1. Capturing the movie first at 640x480 in Motion JPEG (MJPEG)
or Huffyuv (Lossless YUV). At this point the movie should be
a few gigabytes in size.

2. You could then use Virtual Dub to compress it once again into
its final DivX format. It should be up to 95% smaller now.
This also gives you a chance use advanced video filters.

3. Enjoy.

http://www.virtualdub.org/links
http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html
http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, "Kid"! I will experiment using your info. I know many people now have the DivX codec, but for general usage, MJPG seems to make more sense. I'll have to compare file sizes on a couple of tests.
Regards,
Ron A