Compressing mpeg1 videos with ffmpegX?

sanfran

I am new to smugmug and was wondering if anyone could help with a quick question. I finally figured out (thanks to this forum how to covert my avi files to mpeg1 using ffmpegX on the Mac. The longest video that this works for, however, is only about 30 seconds.

I don't know much about video formatting, but as long as I compress the videos, I should be able to get longer ones to work, right? Does anybody know how to do this in ffmpegx? I randomly tried lowering the bitrate but that doesn't seem to be working - is there a specific bitrate/video size that I need to use?

Thanks!

DodgeV83

Are you saying you cannot compress source videos that are longer than 30 seconds, or that the final .mpg is never longer than 30 seconds even though the source file is? Or are you saying that you are compressing your videos just fine, but only the ones 30 seconds or less are small enough to upload to Smugmug with the MB limit?

If your saying the resulting filesize is too high, then reducing the bitrate is the key.

sanfran

DodgeV83 wrote:

Are you saying you cannot compress source videos that are longer than 30 seconds, or that the final .mpg is never longer than 30 seconds even though the source file is? Or are you saying that you are compressing your videos just fine, but only the ones 30 seconds or less are small enough to upload to Smugmug with the MB limit?

If your saying the resulting filesize is too high, then reducing the bitrate is the key.

Without any sort of compression, the longest video (just converted directly from the avi file) that I can get on smugmug is about 30 seconds. Basically, I have very little experience with video formatting and don't know how to compress at all. I'd like to get the file size smaller so that I can post longer videos. When I tried to lower the bitrate in ffmpegX, I got some sort of error and the conversion wouldn't work. Do I need to lower to a specific bitrate/video size or change any other settings? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

DodgeV83

Yes, in order to reduce the filesize you need to reduce the bitrate. Bitrate and file size go hand in hand.

I can't help you with that error though, I've never used that program and I don't use a Mac. I've read many Mac users here complaining about not being able to do it...sorry I can't help.