Most Compatible AVI

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 31/12/2008 12:01:10

My goal is to create AVI's of my digital MiniDV tapes and place them on external hard drives for convenience and accessibility.

I am having difficulty creating AVI's that play properly in VideoLAN (A.K.A. VLC Media Player) or Windows Media Player. They will be jerky, have bizarre audio artifacts, or exhibit horizontal scan lines. My concern is that I'm not creating the most "compatible" type of AVI files.

Here's what I did...
- Recorded VHS onto digital MiniDV tapes in SD.
- Captured those tapes back onto the computer using PD7.
- "Produced" DV-AVI Type 1 files.

I noticed there are also DV-AVI Type 2 and Windows AVI formats. Which should I use for greatest compatibility?

Thinking that I should be using Windows AVI, I produced a short video using DV-AVI Type 1 and compared it to Windows AVI. They both seemed to play OK though I noticed horizontal jaggies on the DV-AVI. Also, the Windows AVI was 829MB where the DV-AVI Type 1 was 160MB. I know storage media is much less expensive today but don't need to "waste" space either. Regardless, I want to retain the highest quality in the most compatible mode.

Added...
I just produced a 30 minute video using Windows AVI with no compression. It was over 30GB! I know that an hour of SD AVI should be around 14-15GB so I'm definitely not doing something right.

Added...
I produced the same 30 minute video using DV-AVI Type 2 and it was 6.5GB and played fine in VLC and Windows media players.

There are a lot versions of AVI out there. I'm not sure why you wouldn't have chosen MPG2 as the file of choice... most DVD's are encoded in some type of MPG2 format and Powerdirector easily encodes it, even HD, and most software applications can import and play it.

I want the best quality. MPEG2 would compress it by 2/3rds.

I'm using Sony Vegas Movie Studio as it is able to re-render without compressing. My guess is that PD7 can do this as well but I've yet to figure out how.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 03/01/2009 21:36:46

Hi Dan,

A DV-AVI file is a type of file where the video has been compressed, this compresses only the individual frames and does not apply interframe compression, resulting in higher file sizes with a lesser quality loss.

DV-AVI type 1, uses a single stream to store audio and video.
DV-AVI type 2 uses one stream to store audio and one stream to store video, creating a larger file size.

Windows AVI files are larger than DV-AVI because they are stored in raw format without compression.

Quality wise, it would be hard to differentiate between the two.

Robert