How to Compress Video_ts files Withouth Loss of Quality

I have lots of Video_ts movie files and I am quickly running out of space because they use up approx 5GB each.

Does anyone know if it is possible to compress these files without loosing quality. The files are played on a 42" plasma, so quality is important.

I would like to use the files in Apple's frontrow software if possible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

David

 

That is pretty much impossible. The only good codecs (and with them you'll still loose quality) are wmvhd and h264. You're on Apple so I'd take h264. To preserve as much quality keep the bitrate high. I'm on Windows and play the hdv vids on my XBox360, so wmvhd is my codec. I use 8Mbit for 720P (you want some 10-12) for 1080i and they look visually the same as m2t. But if you're looking really close you'll see slight differences. After all m2t is already compressed and uses 25mbit. You can't squeeze out much more. So either get another hdd (like 500GB external) or us 12mbit wmvhd or h264, that cuts the space needed in half and you'll still have very good quality.

Let alone divx or xvid, they are not very good with hdv material.

 

Do you know any good software which will convert the fiels to H.264.

Thanks

 

Lossless compression is a lot less efficient. Basically, something like zip or rar are the best you can hope for. Stuff like H.264 is generally good quality, but it's still lossy, so you won't get the same quality as before compression.

 

Zip and rar are not video codecs. You can compress your m2t into those types but you need to unpack them every time you wanna play em.

Codecwise H264 is pretty much the best besides VC1 (that is WMVHD - VC1 is used for BlueRay-DVDs and HD-DVD) but on a Mac H264 is better. After all WMVHD (and VC1) is more Windows based.

There are a lot of programs that compress video. A great forum with lots of help in that area is http://www.sonyhdvinfo.com/index.php (editing section) and http://www.doom9.org/

The best tools to convert video into wmvhd are Procoder, WMEncoder and VirtualDub. For H264, Nero Recode is the best by far followed by x264 and Quicktime Pro 7.

Hope this helps.

 

I know that. But they can compress videos, and they are lossless. (but as you say, have to unzip them every time you want to play)
Pretty much everything else is lossy compression.

 

Actually, I just now 'compressed' an 8192 KB MPEG2 video file using RAR and guess what? The resulting file is 7559 KB. Encoded video just don't compress too good. The little bit it compressed is probably just the file header and such.