AVI Editing and compression

[Nerd-o-rama]

So, I've recently started a Let's Play thread for which I plan to use a fair bit of video captured from the game I'm demonstrating. The emulator I'm using to play (no accusing me of piracy, please. I own both the system and the game I'm using it for, so it's perfectly legal) is handy in that it can automatically capture AVI files, but I have no clue how to edit or compress such files. Does the Playground have any recommendations for easy-to-use programs I can use to compress or crop AVI files?

Also, is there some trick to making YouTube actually register my freaking upload requests? It keeps just sitting there instead of starting the upload. In desperation, I'm using photobucket.

[Fri]

what's wrong with photobucket?

Anyway, just search for 'Avi encoder/decoder' in google for free video coder/decoder than you can use to compress your video and whatnot.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Well, photobucket's problem was the 100MB upload limit, which is why I needed to be able to crop videos. Anyway, YouTube works for me now, and I picked up the freeware "AVIEdit", although that has a problem that approximately doubles the size of a video whenever I save it, and I have no clue what the problem is. Regardless, since I'm not going to go over 1 GB video size, I'm not going to worry about editing too much. If the readers want fancy spliced animations, they can just look for RedComet86 or ShinigamiDuo's videos.

[Ashtar]

For compression (and minimal editing - deleting parts), I would use VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/)which has all the capabilities you might desire. It's open source, free and damn(!) fast. I use it regularly since I don't need much in the video editing dept, just the odd recompression.

Also there is Avidemux (http://www.avidemux.org/)which is recommended as it is more capable than VirtualDub, again it's nice free software and it's platform independent. I have never used the soft so can't really say anything.

Hope that helps.

And remember to use a nice Codec for you videos... basic windows avi codec is like huge and bad. Use some nicer xvid or x264 for better compression.