Compress a video file with Virtualdub

Anyone who has ever seen some kind of video knows how large the uncompressed video file is. The large size of these video files is a premise for the proliferation of video compression algorithms such as DivX, Xvid, MP4 ., but you exactly compress this uncompressed video file into one of the above formats. How, to save space and manage your insight?

In this article, we'll show you exactly that. We will use an open source application called Virtualdub to compress a video file while preserving its original quality.

VirtualDub is a video compression utility for windows. It is completely free, open source software and released as a GNU GPL license.

By default, Virtualdub does not have any built-in video codec, because of the limitation of registration. However, you can start by downloading the Xvid codec from www.xvid.org. This is the format that we will use to compress our videos.

Once the codec is installed, start Virtualdub and press Ctrl + O to find the uncompressed video file. Virtualdub will download the video file and you will see a screen similar to the screen below.

This is called a timeline view.

A video file in a format like .avi that is used here has two parts, a video and an audio section, and we can consider both parts separately to compress. To consider the level of compression that can be achieved, let's try with an uncompressed file of about 716MB, then view the size of the compressed file after finishing the compression process.

Click Video and select Compression option (or press Ctrl + P ). From the Codecs list that appears in the left pane of the window, select " Xvid MPEG-4 Codec " and click on it.

Configuration

The only option you need to consider in the Configure window is the Target bitrate . When you open this window for the first time, you will see the default value of the original file bitrate . In this case it is 700 kbps. We will change it to 300 kbps. 300 is a logical bit if you want to publish a video file to the web and benefit from the file size.

Click OK and return to the timeline view.

Now, we need to select a compression codec for the Audio section of this file. From the Audio menu, select the option titled " Full processing mode ". Now, select Audio again and click Compression .

From the list of Audi codecs , select MPEG Layer-3 and click OK to return to the timeline view.

Now, to create the archive, select File -> Save as AVI and put a new name for this compressed file. Virtualdub will now start saving the compressed file to the path of your choice

After the compression process is complete, you can check the size of this new file.

Do you find anything surprising?

Of course, the compressed file will have a slightly lower quality but surely you will be satisfied with it, and are very pleased with the capacity issue you save when using this compressed file.