Question about compression

[ty3]

just want to know what is the best software to use to compress a 20 minute episode to 100MB without editing the video into parts

[lordsmurf]

There is no way to do this with it looking bad.
XVID would be about 175MB at 512-384 to look good
and MPEG-2 would be about 400MB for 352x480 to look good

RealMedia does about 90MB and looks like vomit on screen.

[ty3]

only reason i asked is because i saw some videos that were twenty minutes or longer on youtube and just curious on how they managed to do it i didn't bother to watch the video so i guess that answers that question thanks and the xvid you mentioned i do have that but what is it mostly used for could you give me some pointer maybe

[lordsmurf]

Those are Adobe Flash (FLV) formatted video. From what I've seen, Youtube uses professional Sorenson-based Flash video (professional video codec), sized to 320x240 with a 425x318 playback size. They're not very good quality either. I can create On2V6-codec (Sorenson, medium-end codec) that are native 425x318, using Adobe Flash CS3 (v8) and Flash CS3 Encoder and they still are not very good viewed much larger than native size. Youtube also has some degree of mystery in their compression filesize choices and encoder settings, so video quality varies wildly.

I use this stuff where I work.