DVD conversion

[dogblower]

A friend of mine has just shot some great video and wants to post it to his (commercial) website. On my advice he cut and edited it down to 45 seconds, then burned it to DVD and handed it over.

Unfortunately, the clip he has given me is 26Mb.

Ideally, I would like to knock this down to less than 4Mb and/or convert it to Flash since we don't need DVD quality for the website and this would stream faster. My version of Flash 8 just gives me an "Unexpected File Format" when I try to import the vob file.

I tried ripping the DVD and managed to get it down to a 10MB mpeg. Still too large and I still get the "Unexpected File Format" message from Flash when I try to import it.

I've never played with these things before and I wondered if we have any gurus on the Board who can give me some pointers?

[LivinLOS]

Flash is not an ideal tool for video compression (fine for cartoons but not video)..

Theres lots of video codecs out there for high compression.. Avoid quickslime (mainly due to its horrible player and install needs) I like H264 and XVid but for you thats probably not required and complex..

For ease of use and simple encoding try WMV (windows media video) its going to be readily viewable on the majority of machines and will compress easily with low user interaction.

[LivinLOS]

If you want to learn anything (and I do mean anything.. Some serious level discussion here) look on www.doom9.org

[dogblower]

Hey, thanks much. I just knew there'd be some big brains out there who could sort this out. Looking at wmv now.