Video Conversion

This isnt a hugely important question, but i am interested. I started using handbrake to convert my tv shows and movies to put on my ipod, and while it seems to suck for dvds, its excellent for already ripped dvds or videos i have on my hard drive.

what i find funny is, say i have 2 tv shows. one episode of "archer" a cartoon, and one episode of "how i met your mother" a real person show. both original files are 175 mb, have roughly the same length (about 22 minutes). however, archer converts into m4v at 82 mb, where how i met your mother gets about 130 mb. whats up with that!? all cartoons get a much lower file size than live action shows. i kinda just wanna know why.

 

I guess that the picture in cartoons is far less complex, so it can be compressed more.

 

Basically, the goal of any video compression technology is to reuse the parts of each frame that don't change from one to the next...

So say you have a car moving across a static background... what will happen is the video encoder will reuse the static background pixels, and only change the pixels that are part of the car, since the car is the only thing moving from frame to frame. <--That's a rough way to put it. It's a tad bit more involved of a process.

Then there are different types of compression, and different codec formats and containers. MP4/M4V/h.264/AVC is a very efficient compression codec. It doesn't surprise me at all that your file sizes between different content changes that much.

 

HAL pretty much said it perfectly. Cartoons compress much better than 'real person' shows (LOL).