Archiving Video to save space.

[personalt 0]

I am running two toshibas and a panasonic ip camera. Right now i am using active web cam while i review other software.

 

My issue is file storage.

 

I am running a 640x480 picture at .5 frames I am running about 330 megs per hour per camera if i record to straight avi.

 

I was having the program recompress with divx when in 200 meg blocks but i am wondering if there is a better solution. My problem with divx via active web cam is it only allows for one pass. if i run in multipl

 

if i record in straight avi or mpeg is there a program i can run later that will resize the files down to something smaller with a lower framerate?

 

What I want to do is keep the full size files for a week and then archive them at a smaller size and lower framerate. Is there a program that i can re-compress these files with. a bid concern is not losing the original timestamp. that would make my life a lot easier.

 

is there a good way to do this? is there a better codec to use?

[rory 0]

You can use Windows Movie Maker to convert an AVI to a WMV file .. this can make an 800MB 720x480 AVI file as small as 80MB.

 

Rory

[Thomas 0]

The problem is automating the batch process. Windows movie maker isn't good for that. On a linux box I could set up a cron job to do it but you're going to have a hard time doing it in windows.

[personalt 0]

I was looking at it further and I think I have two issues.

 

1. Is stringing the AVI files together. On some days I set the file size really low like 30 megs. So some days I have 20 files for one day. I would want to rebuild those into one file.

 

2. reworking the files to decrease size. Either by removing frames, reducing size or a adjusting quality.

 

These cameras watch a construciton site, my goal is to have good video for a week or so to watch for theft etc. However the goal of archived video is to just generally track the guys progress so at the end I can work through the videos and figure out how long in days it took to do certain tasks.

 

If there good software for stiching avi files, adjusting framerates/compressing all while not messing with the date code. I would prefer if the dates dont get changed but since the dates are in the file it is not a super huge deal, just something I would like.