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I haven't tried it yet but a video codec maybe worth checking out is:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac

Apparently it's a research codec being developed by the BBC.

i just finished encoding a julia animation using some new codecs:

* lagarith, similar to huffyuv in that it predicts the image mean and encodes the differences but using more modern (patented?) compression algorithms
* x264, an opensource implementation of the popular mpeg4 avc spec

first things first: lagarith outperformed huffyuv very impressively, producing a 25mb file compared to huffyuv's 37mb! the encoding was also noticably faster, this is because although lagarith is much slower (in terms of cpu cycles per byte) it ends up writing a lot less data; it's quite a stable codec and supports both 64bit and multithreading, which makes me very happy of course

x264, a lossy codec, managed to compress this video to just under 2mb! that's really really impressive, and the while the encoding time was pretty long (and didn't multithread properly) the results are definitely worth it.

here's the x264 encoded video: http://www.fractographer.com/wip/julia_x264.avi

you can go here to get x264: http://x264.nl or google for ffdshow (which is highly recommended anyway!), ditto for lagarith.

well if it comes to that, we should bear in mind that the fastest we can ever go is the speed of light; even at a mere 13.7 billion lightyears (only what we can see, not what's "out there") i think the universe will have long expanded into a 0K void before we can hope to reach our original position through any kind of cyclic behaviour

another x264 test video: http://www.fractographer.com/wip/julia2_x264.avi

i notice that white is not being preserved during playback, it doesn't look so great will have to look into this; at least the crispness is maintained.

hmm i really like virtualdub though, it does exactly what i need do you know of any simple editors like vdub that can spit matroska (or whatever the hot fashion is)? i save a series of bmp frames, and i guess my win32 vfw saving code won't be of any help...

Well...

Look what I started!

Yup.

I crashed my computer and had a hard time getting it all working again, but I got an external hard drive and cleaned out everything.

Time to read all the reference links in here and study up!

No more 800 MB avi files that run a mere 1,000 frames for me!

Tim M. (Euph0ria) wrote:
>
>    On the topic (off topic) of archiving your renders or any data for that matter....
>    Take a look at www.quickpar.com and read up on the benifits of par2.

Greetings, Tim.    And thanks for the above tip.  

Nice to see another long time user of FractInt in the group.  Enjoyed the "Fractal Heart of Chaos" image and would have loved seeing that in the 30x20 poster you had made.

Anyway...    Welcome to this Forum!!    
 

try the microsoft media encoder

its what i use to convert AVI to WMV (which is like MPEG4) for posting on my site

file size = file size * 0.10

and very good quality, not much loss in resolution

also, its free!