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As a personal project for my family I recently purchased myself a Composite-USB converter in order to preserve many of the family's old home movies on VHS.

Now, the proprietary software that the adapter comes with allows exporting at 720x480 in many formats such as: AVI, WMV, MPEG, VCD, and others. My original plan was to save the videos to DVDs and disseminate them throughout the family.

Unfortunately, I’m now finding after I finished my first tape that these files are excessively large. The first tape clocked in at under 22 minutes and the AVI file ended up at +30GB.

Is there another format I could try that would encode at a different bitrate? Perhaps other software like Handbrake I could try recording with; assuming the device is compatible?

Below link shows the device I bought:

At this point, my only option for preserving and sharing the videos with family so they can easily watch in the future is to put them all on Flash Drives.

I had thought about BluRay-DL but that can get expensive very fast and everyone would need a compatible player.

Any ideas?

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  • There was no DVD Authoring software included. Just the capture and conversion software. Could Handbrake or WMM accomplish the final encoding?
    – Jacob K
    Sep 11, 2015 at 1:15
  • I tried converting the original large AVI to h.264 MPEG in Handbrake but I immediately got incompatibility errors. I think I may try to capture in WMV and transcode that.
    – Jacob K
    Sep 11, 2015 at 2:35

2 Answers 2

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Use MPEG.

FYI. Any DVD authoring software worthy of using will automatically re-encode the video DVD style and shrink the files size down to a manageable amount.

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  • Re-capturing the first tape with MPEG4 now. will check and see if the file size is reduced.
    – Jacob K
    Sep 11, 2015 at 1:17
  • Captured the same tape as before using MPEG format. File size is significantly smaller at a tiny 90.5MB but the quality dropped drastically as well. Lots of pixelation and stuttering during playback.
    – Jacob K
    Sep 11, 2015 at 2:27
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You need to decide the trade-off between quality, ease of use and size.

For ease of use for "the older generation", you may want to transcode the files so they will fit on DVD - 22 minutes should have no problem fitting on a DVD using MPEG2, even with pretty high resolution.

For newer devices, transcode to H264 or MPEG4. Note that AVI is a "container" format, ie you can have a small or large AVI file of, effectively the same quality, depending on the codec you use.

Yes, you should be able to use handbrake to make the files more usable.

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