How to Compress a Video with H.264

Video’s require a large amount of hard drive space. Whether personal videos recorded with a camcorder, or a commercial video purchased from an online store such as Netflix or CinemaNow, the video will usually take up anywhere from half a gigabyte to 4GB or more.

The popularity of such videos has increased the market for external hard drives and larger internal hard drives. External hard drives can be purchased for up to 1TB (1000GB). If you can’t afford a large hard drive, or don’t wish to invest in a new one, you can reduce the size of the videos by compressing them with H.264.

H.264 compression greatly reduces the file size of a video, taking the size from 100+MB to 20MB or less. This compression is Apple sided, and won’t work with Windows Media Player. This doesn’t matter, however, when there are players like VideoLan VLC media player, which works on all major OS’s (including Linux), and can work on a Windows machine.

To compress your videos to H.264, you will only need one software, called SUPER. SUPER can be downloaded for free, and works wonderfully.

1: Download the software. Once the software is downloaded, install it. Once it is installed, it may say that your machine does not have enough hard drive space or RAM, or that to much CPU is being used up. If you have enough to work with, you can ignore this message. If your CPU is running very slow, however, or you hard drive is nearly full, you will need to increase them before beginning.

2: Once your machine is ready and the software is installed, use the software to locate your video and load it. Now, in the settings at the top, choose .MOV as the file type. In the next section, use H.264 as the compression type. Leave the audio as the default selection. Now decide what size you want the video to be. If you don’t need it full size, choosing a smaller resolution will make the file size smaller. If you want it the same size, simply choose ‘No Change’. If you l

want it smaller, choose one of the custom settings, or continue clicking ‘More’ until you have the option of manually entering a size.

Now you must choose the video quality. This is done in the Bitrate section. The bitrate will decide how large the file size is and how high the quality is. The higher the bitrate, the higher both the quality and the size will be. If the video is full HD, the bitrate should be no lower than 4000. If the video is half HD, the bitrate can go as low as 2000. Playing with a few short test videos at different bitrates is the best way to choose, however.

Once you have decided on a bitrate you like, you have to choose the audio. If the video is a movie, choose 48k stereo. If the source was lower, however, choose whichever one is the same. If the source was recorded via a mono mic, be sure not to check the stereo option, as it will make the audio worse. Now choose a bitrate – the audio bitrate works the same as the video bitrate. 128K is usually an okay choice.

3: Now that all the settings are configured, click encode and leave it alone until it’s finished. That’s it!