Windows 7 - Best recorded live tv compression software?

The problem: I recorded a really good film I want to keep. The file is just over 5GB.

I want to compress it to about 20% of that with minimal loss of quality.

I've been looking on line for several days. I found MCEBuddy,but am having trouble getting it to work.

Try
Avidemux
or
Free Video Converter

They both require a bit a of learning, and avidemux probably has more encoding options.

Free advice: avidemux can "copy" the audio & video w/o re-encoding, pretty quickly. Try editing out a short portion of your video, and save that with Video & audio "copy"; then use that piece to expirement on to get the compression you want. Two pass gives best quality & size but it takes a long time. CHeck under Video (left side) -> Configure to change compression. All re-encoding/compression is pretty slow, and if you test on the whole video you might be waiting hours to see how it came out!
PS: I'm running avidemux even as we speak...

Thanks.

I tried free Video converter and it's spiffo. Converted the file to avi. It's now 500 meg,but has lost some quality. I will experiment with other formats. The conversion rate is quiet acceptable.

Now looking for an an app to remove the ads. I've had a quick Google.There seem to be a few around,I'll hunt. I will of course be grateful for any suggestions.

You can remove the ads with Free Video converter - click the scissors to the right of the file name and you're in an editor. Do this before you convert it!

Yes I know, I want something which will do it automatically.

Umm, the sound is out of synch. There any way to fix that?

You might look into Show Analyzer. It detects commercials automatically and builds an XML file that defines the start/end of the "chapters" of program, thus eliminating the commercial pods (which are outside the bounds of the "chapters"). You need to use an automatic editing program that understands the "chapter" XML files, which as I understand things is quite a standard technique that is generally understood by many editing products.

I sort of used it for a while when I was using BeyondTV, but ultimately decided that the built-in SmartSkip functionality of BeyondTV was superior in its algorithms for detecting commercial pods.

And then when I went to Windows Media Center for watching/recording TV, I decided simply to not do any of this automatically. Instead I just use the 30-second skip button on the remote (repeatedly as needed) to manually skip through commercial pods, and then to back up one or two 12-second units if I overshoot. This is actually fine, and saves LOTS of CPU time, fan cooling, electricity, etc. Plus the recordings are available immediately, instead of having to be auto-scanned for commercial removal. Plus, this would only work on "copy-freely" content anyway, and I was also recording "copy-once" protected contents from my TWC/LA cable system using the cablecard-enabled Ceton tuner card.

Anyway, you might give Show Analyzer a shot. It's pretty highly regarded and used, with a user community and forum for discussion and exchange of the "configuration file" to tune the ad-detection process.

I'm attaching the last configugration file one I tried (which was from someone else) which worked quite well. Of course that was 1 1/2 years ago, so somebody might have built a much smarter one by now... and it would be available on the Show Analyzer forum. Note that the extension of my attachment is "TXT" but it should be "CONF", however the forum won't allow it to be attached as a ".CONF" file.

Good luck.

OOPS... just noticed it's not free. It's $30, but if it works great it's obviously worth it... and software developers need to eat too.

Free Converter is a little more user friendly and cleaner-looking, but it's also simpler than Avidemux, which has more audio (and video) encoding options, including an audio "Time Shift" under "Audio Filters" (left side of picture, which shows a message that might explain what's going on in your situation).

I'd been using Avi under Linux, then thought Free was nicer for Windows but went back to Avi in Windows after having some subtle problems playing AVI videos on a older DVD player (AVI files on an SD card or disk).

Avidemux has lots of info about its options and video in general, and its own forum:
Avidemux.org
start [Avidemux DokuWiki]

Video is pretty complicated, and I'm not an expert - you might want to check out a video forum.

@flemur

Thank you, I will try Avidemux. I had a quick look and it seems a bit complicated. However, as you say it has a forum,I'll give it a go.


@dsperber

Thank you,I will also try Show Analyzer.


In the meantime I've got MCEBuddy to work.It removes the ads and will convert to several formats. I've chosen mp4 because I can play the file on my PC as well as on the built-in usb player on my TV.

I haven't' tried to watch it yet.

FWIW, I've never needed to use anything other than the pulldowns on the left side of the GUI to do everything I needed with Avidemux (IOW, no menus from the top)

Less bytes is less quality. There is no magic to make it smaller and keep the original quality.