Wallyworld

Oh man...I'm stoked! I've been trying to find a good compression tool to make my YouTube videos look better. I'm shooting on HDV now - using the new CanonHV20 and whilst the original footage looks great by the time YouTube converts it to Flash its well and truly lost a lot of quality. I've tried all sorts of compression ratings on my Mac - you name it I've tried it. The best I've found so far is Quicktime's H264. But it takes forever for the compression and the end result has still got artefacts and lines across it. Then I stumbled across DivX Compression Codec. And I've been fiddling around with it. I tried converting my Quicktime videos that had been compressed using H264 and again it didn't look that hot. So to cut to the chase - what I did was take the original footage that I'd uploaded to the Mac's iMovie and made a Quicktime movie at Full Quality. Yes you've guessed it - the file ended up being nearly One Gigabyte (1Gb) for only 1:44 minutes of footage shot on the HDV camera. It looks fabulous but obviously it was way too big for YouTube. So I ran it through the Free DivX Download which reduces the file from 966Mb (almost a gigabyte) to a piddling 17.82 Mb - well within YouTube (and other vid-sharing sites) limit of 100Mb. Isn't that amazing! And look at the quality! Not bad eh? The strange hiss in the audio is heavy rain falling outside. To get from nearly One Gigabyte to just under 18 Megabyte is fantastic! And DivX is available for both PC and Mac users.

BTW the DivX converter is available as a free download for a 15 day trial. Then you must pay €14.99 to upgrade.

Why Buy The DivX Pro Version?

Simple answer - for more features and control. You get full versions of the DivX Converter and the DivX Pro Codec - two things that let you create DivX videos.

DivX Converter

The DivX Converter lets you create DivX movies. Der. Obvious. It's too easy - you just drag and drop if you're on a Mac (and you should be).

Share DivX movies

With the upgrade you can also generate HTML to paste into your blog or website to publish your DivX movies.

Batch encode

You can convert multiple files to DivX in a single step. Just by queuing them up.

But Wait...there's more!

When you shell out your $20 (or the equivalent of €19.99) you have full control to crop, resize, remove borders, set encoding bitrates, tweak quality settings and more doo-dads.

DivX Pro Codec

DivX puts it this way - The DivX Pro Codec is the top of the food chain, codec-wise. It includes the most advanced version of the DivX video encoder so you can create the highest-quality DivX files in combination with DivX Converter, QuickTime Pro or any other QuickTime export enabled video application (e.g., iMovie, Final Cut Pro).

Once your videos are converted into DivX you can burn them to CD or DVD and watch them on your TV with a certified DVD player or transfer them to certified handheld or portable devices. You can also post your home movies online, email videos to friends or store your whole video collection on your computer while saving valuable hard-drive space. Brilliant huh?

This is the latest test. 705MB down to 90MB. Speeded-up footage and just using the Free Trial. With the Pro Version it looks much better.