• Compression Techniques

  converting mkv to avi without losing quality

  Posted by Ine Tylczyn on April 23, 2011 at 1:34 pm

  I’m an amv maker (using Sony Vegas 9 and AE) so I need my clips to have a good quality (in 1280×720) So I dl some anime eppies in mkv(300-400 mb per file) and I tried to convert them using Total Video Converter to avi but it grew to more than 1gb per file.
  Should I use different converter? Tried some and the results were horrible >___> I wanna have good quality clips I can easily use in SV so…

  Craig Seeman replied 15 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Craig Seeman

  April 23, 2011 at 5:54 pm

  avi and mkv are containers, not codecs. What’s inside can determine relative quality. Data rate is the primary factor in determining size although metadata can have some impact.
• 

  Ine Tylczyn

  April 23, 2011 at 6:24 pm

  still what should I do?
• 

  Craig Seeman

  April 23, 2011 at 7:25 pm

  What are the codecs inside?
  I’d say match the data rate but some more efficient codecs can use a lower data rate and less efficient ones might need a higher data rate.

  For example if you are going from MPEG1 in avi to WebM in mkv you may be able to lower your data rate which would give you a much smaller file and maintain most of the quality.

  I actually noticed you’re going the other way, mkv to avi but the principle still holds. The mkv might be H.264 or maybe DivX? If you are converting to a form of AVI for editing you may well get a much larger file size for a codec the editing software can handle. It may be that your very large file is exactly what you need for editing. Once editing you might then compress it to H.264 for example so final output could be a much smaller file size.

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