Tong Family

Supposed you have a bunch of really fat MPEG-1 files around. How can you get them into a modern format. I have one that is 600MB and I was curious to see what it could compress to. It’s not clear from the web how to do all this, but the piece parts are there. Here is what you need to do:
# Download Gordian Knot. This comes with various codecs like besweet that you’ll need later.
# Download Ogg Vorbis codec and also the related tools Oagmachine and Oggmux.
# Download the latest release of VirtualDub.
# Download Xvid codec pack
Now the process is a little crazy, but it works at least for me:
# Open up the MPEG-1 file in VirtualDub. This can read MPEG-1 and also uncompressed and very fat AVI.
# Video compression. First, choose Audio/No Audio. Now choose Video/Compression. Go down to Xvid codec and choose Configure to make sure the options are correct. I normally choose 2-pass
# Choose File/Save AVI and create a silent .avi file
# Choose File/Save WAV to create the uncompressed wave file
# Start Oagmachine and open the WAV file, pick your option and then choose OGG and click on Give me Ogg.
# Start Oggmux, input file is the .avi and the .ogg file is the audio file, then choose the output file as a .ogm and click on Mux it!
Not clear exactly what the compresion advantage of this is quite yet, but it is fun to learn about new codecs and how they translate. Theoretically, you should get 2x compression going from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, but we’ll experiment and see.