> I have a 3 hour long VHS I need to convert / encode to a digital media > format that can fit on a CD (so it can be distributed).
OK. > Here is the catch: The format must be GPLed / Open Sourse. I think you have asked this here before, didn't you? Anyway, you're in a problem. Here's why: You want to fit a 3 hours long VHS to 1 CD, that means a good (or should I say OVERKILL) compression. A 3 hour Video will not look so good under 650-700MB video (specially if you have lots of motion).. As for GPL - forget it. Currently there aren't any GPL codecs which can do a good job. There is Theora but it's still in development stages, so you can't use it.. The closest one that you can use is XVID (xvid.org) which is a reverse engineering of DivX 3 + improvments. It's pretty good at this stage, but get this: XVid codec cannot officially be distributed in U.S or Japan. Why? good question (I guess due to copyrights, patents etc).. If you'll use the freely MPEG-1 compression (MPEG-2 got tons of patents), then you'll need at least 3 CD's (if you go with VCD compression which is MPEG-1 derivative). At the moment, the best ones (and heavily patented) are: * Windows Media 9 (you can play it with mplayer or Xine with the win32 codecs) * On 2's VP6 codec (same issues) * RV40 (Real player's "Real One") If anyone wants from you to codec something with GPL codec - ask him the codec name - I'll be happy to hear about it. Thanks, Hetz ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
