Efficient video compressors?

On 24 Jan 2010, at 08:49, Charles Maurer wrote:

> I need to compress a few terabytes of data from a video camera. What
> would be the most sensible software to use for this job on a 64-bit
> Mac Pro running Snow Leopard? The compression ratio will probably
> matter less than the speed of compression.


As I read your question you wish to compress the files stored on your
machine, in a way in which they can be restored to the state before
they were compressed (i.e. 'lossless')? Assuming that the video
camera already records it in a compressed format (unless it is a
particularly specialist camera it will compress the video in some way)
you are likely to find that the savings are low due to the compression
that has already been applied. A few years ago where I work we had
around 10TB of compressed video files that we were backing up to tape,
from memory we tried backing up with and without compression and the
compressed backups were almost the same size as the uncompressed ones
(I think the difference was a few percent).

Depending on how the video is compressed already, you may be able to
convert the video to a lower data rate codec, this will almost
certainly be 'lossy' and cannot be recovered to the exact state it was
in prior to the change. What you wish to use the video for in the
future will determine whether this is a sensible option or not?

Regards,

Patrick,

On Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:49:22 -0800, Charles Maurer wrote:
> I need to compress a few terabytes of data from a video camera. What
> would be the most sensible software to use for this job on a 64-bit
> Mac Pro running Snow Leopard? The compression ratio will probably
> matter less than the speed of compression.

Try Handbrake. It can do stand-alone files now. It has a lot of presets
for different Apple devices. The lower the resolution the faster the
encode (i.e. iPod Touch encodes faster than Apple TV settings).

http://handbrake.fr/

On 24-Jan-10 01:49, Charles Maurer wrote:
> I need to compress a few terabytes of data from a video camera. What would be the most sensible software to use for this job on a 64-bit Mac Pro running Snow Leopard? The compression ratio will probably matter less than the speed of compression.

I would use HandBrake for this (actually, I would use HandBrakeCLI for
this, but that's me).