I recently got myself a nice SONY digital camcorder which came with free PIXELA software allowing me to take video then download and save it on the PC as MPEG1 files. I was looking forward to putting various magic demos on my magic website, as well as post video clips on the family website for my folks in the UK to watch.

However, the MPEG files it creates are huge, even for a few seconds of video, and even if I choose the "low quality" capture option.

I suspect I need some additional software allowing me to compress the MPEGs, or even convert them to another, less space-greedy format (AVI?).

Any help/suggestions as to what I should get would be greatly appreciated.

Colin

One option you can try is to convert them to Real Player or Windows Media Player format. Another one that has started to gain popularity is Divx format. It pretty good quality and the file size isn't that big. Just go to http://www.google.com and type in Divx and there'll be plenty of results.

Another option is to just get the highest quality possible and then burn it onto a CD-rom. Blank CD's are fairly inexpensive and because of their small size, shipping them to other countries ain't that expensive either.

At the current technological state that we're in, unless someone has Cable, DSL or a T1 or T3 connection, video clips are just ugly. And even with faster connections, the quality isn't always the greatest either.

Unless it's a very important video clip you want to put on your website, you're gonna be better off just putting pictures. I would rather see a clear, good quality still picture of a friend or family member than a choppy video that takes a while to download.