Shrinking Movies - How?

[Applecrusher]

Just wondering how in hell I shrink all of my movies?

I know I should use a program of some sorts, but which? I have no idea

Most are in Divx or Xvid format, so one that can handle them is ok..

[eloquence]

The first question is why you want to shrink your movies, and whether you want to just reduce the file size or reduce the resolution. There are programs like SmartMovie which are designed to produce reduced-resolution movies for PDAs and the like. They're not suitable for if you just want to fit more files on your hard drive, but they're ideal for their specific purpose.
If you already have a file in DivX or XviD format, then you there aren't any codecs which will give you a significant improvement in file size for the same quality, so the only option would be recoding in the same format. You could do this using something like Pinnacle Studio (the LE edition can be picked up cheaply).
Your best option (if possible) for producing smaller file sizes, is to get the movies from the original source again, and have them compressed to a smaller size in the first place - you'll avoid introducing new compression artefacts into the video stream, and you can ensure that it's run multi-pass to maximise the image quality.
With all that said, once you've got it in one of the most efficient codecs available (DivX and XviD not being bad codecs), you have to lose an increasing amount of the visual quality to compress the files any more, so it's not always worthwhile.

[Applecrusher]

Well they are mostly cartoons at 540 x 438 (i think) so image quality wont realy suffer if i lower the quality much, and i could probably drop the res too..

[leejhamilton]

Dr.DivX is designed to allow you to convert your movies to fit different screen resolutions so they work on things like Widescreen TV's, Monitors, Laptops, PDA's and Mobile Phones, obviously the smaller the screen size the smaller the file.

[aidanjt]

Gorden Knot is a great program that deals with transcoding from DVDs to AVI's, I'd highly recommend taking the time to learn and use it.

In your situation you can choose to drop the bitrate of the movies or the resolutions, also you can batch que the reencoding jobs until you've tweaked all your movies and leave the computer to run the batch encodings, then come back later and admire your handy work.

[leejhamilton]

you can get dr.divx here:

http://www.divx.com/divx/drdivx/

[leejhamilton]

Ooops should hva read the page first looks like they have updated teh software now use http://www.divx.com/divx/create/

[smtkr]

Just use virtualdubmod and learn how to write a simple resizing script