[Jay Gatz]

I suppose I worded it wrong: the video isn’t choppy as in it freezing, instead I see the video kind of blocky most of the times. It doesn’t play smooth at all, and at times, there is even some blurriness.

Are you saying that the max bitrate for youtube videos is 2.2mbps? If so, I’ll have to do double rendering, one for posting videos online, and one for personal storage. Overall, would you recommend those settings you linked to for youtube uploading?

I highly doubt it’s a problem with my computer’s performance. I played it with both VLC and KMplayer on a beefy dual core laptop, so I think that can safely be ruled out.

[Jay Gatz]

…and so this post will be helpful to others, I found that using a .wmv package yielded the best results.

I tried the settings on the page you link, Jeremy, using the .mp4 container, but the video was very choppy, and there was definitely some quality loss.

Using .wmv, I was able to maintain the bitrate at above 4.2mbps, and after comparing the two new mp4 and wmv files, the wmv had way better compression and quality.

[Jay Gatz]

Great link, Jeremy. That contains everything I need, thanks a bunch for being so helpful.

[Jay Gatz]

Uhh, I’m not trying to do anything as complex as some of the options you mentioned. I basically want to shrink my existing .mov files, though I am kind of siding towards .avi conversion because I will be sharing these videos with family and friends. I will be doing both uploading to the web (youtube/flickr) and straight up copying the file from my computer to another, which is why I want avi because a lot of computers don’t come equipped to play .mov files by default.

I’m afraid to choose a youtube-specific configuration because I fear that it will sacrifice quality to save some space. Basically, I want to convert my 720p .mov’s to .avi, and in a way where the quality won’t suffer too much. That’s my greatest concern, really, the quality.

Thanks a lot for your help.