Hi Ed,

Well, I can certainly understand why clarity is lost with such severe compression. I'm looking into MPEG solutions. It appears that the MPEG format can be more compressed with less loss of clarity. Actually, I've seen some products on the web that encode/compress AVIs into MPEGs at very high levels of compression. Do you have any thoughts about this? Will I run into the same problem with clarity?

Dave

>>Hello,
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>>I've been asked to develop a FoxPro applicaton, which requires users to email attached AVI files back and forth on a frequent basis. I know there are better transfer methods, but the client insists on email. In fact, the client will not consider any alternatives.
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>>The problem is that the AVI files will be huge as far as email attachments go. File sizes will be anywhere from 20MB to 500MB. This is a huge problem, since the company uses AOL and dialup modems. I don't think AOL allows anything bigger than a 15MB attachment. Even if they did allow unlimited file sizes, it would take days to upload some of those files.
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>>I'm looking for a compression utility that will give me an extremely high level of compression. So far, I've only found products that compress the file size to about half the original. Since I probably need to keep the file sizes down to about 10MB, I doubt there is any product that can compress a 500MB file down to 2 percent of it's original size. Is there? Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question, but I really don't know too much about what's possible with compression.
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>>I was considering using a file splitter to split the files into many smaller pieces and then compress those pieces down even further. However, that would not be very practical either, since the huge files would need to be split into too many files. I don't think the users have time to email or download 50 attachments every day. Is there any solution to this? Are there any products out there that provide extremely high levels of compression? If there are, freeware would be preferable.
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>
>Just my $0.02 worth, but .AVI files do not compress well, at least without resorting to lossy compression techniques, which will reduce the accuracy of rendition. It would be unusual in the extreme to get 2:1 compression on a regular basis from an .AVI file, not within the orders of magnitude difference in storage requirement you need, you'd need to use a lossy compression algorithm; one that reduce the image clarity in exchange for being able to dompress the image further. I've written such compression using fractal representation of images (not written in VFP or VB) and I've improved compressibility by nearly an order of magnitude with the loss of 20-30% of the effective resolution; it required distribution of a decompressor to convert the fractal images back to an .AVI format. It's not an inexpensive option - in my case, it represented over 100 hours of development time in C++, and commercial packages with similar capabilities typically run in the low- to mid-four figures range.
>Targa offers such a product bundled with their professional line of non-linear video editors, which cost in the $8K-15K range with both hardware and software.