How should I compress these media files

jordanwb

I have every episode of Mythbusters on my hard drive. I want to store all the complete seasons onto DVDs. I'm currently at Season 2, but I have to get a Dual Layer DVD for that. So I'm at Season 3 which measures at 5.5GB. What archive format can I use to get it down to fit on a standard DVD?

I tried tar.bz2 but it didn't compress at all.

Sadako · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 5:39 pm Post subject:

Lossy-encoded video is pretty much uncompressable, they are already about as small as you can get them, your only real option if you must shrink them down is to re-encode them...
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frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

gzip / bzip2 compression is targeted at text files... or in general files that have patterns that repeat themselves. media files do not have that, they appear to be random data, or rather the patterns they have are not visible on a byte by byte layer. For these you need smart compressors who understand what the media represents, that can recognize and filter out patterns, probably even at the loss of quality. That's essentially what a video encoder does... recognize patterns in a video and see what you can throw away, preferably without the watcher noticing that it was thrown away. A good video encoder will get you rid of random noise in images and save only what changes from one image to the next, so if a ball rolls across a street, it would only save the ball (the thing that moves), not the street itself (which does not change). You can't do this with gzip.

jordanwb · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 5:51 pm Post subject:

Hmm I see. I guess I'll have to get more than one Dual Layer DVD. That'll cost me a pretty penny.

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

If you don't want to re-encode and can't cut parts off (intro / credits / ads) either, that's the only option to fit it on a single dvd, yeah. apart from splitting the data and distributing it on more than one dvd of course.

jordanwb · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:14 pm Post subject:

When I downloaded them the ads were already cut out. At Staples I can get a 25 DVD-R DL spindle for $30 CDN.

yngwin · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:34 pm Post subject:

Isn't harddrive storage cheaper these days?
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frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

I have to pay 0,088€/GB in hard disks (cheapest possible), 0,0565€/GB in DVD-R media (quality media by Verbatim).

But yeah, both are cheap enough to get, so you should choose according to your needs. I use both - backup disk for automated daily incremental backups using dar. Using a hard disk here makes it easy to automate stuff - DVD-R can't be automated that easily, you always need someone to put in new media. So I only do that occasionally, from time to time, so I have some slightly older states of backups to go back to if the shit really hits the fan.

EDIT: whoops this isn't the backup thread lol :lol: