Hi Hilmar,

I came across a video mail system that is perfect for my prospective client. It uses a video format called Smith Micro video mail format. This format was created by Smith Micro Software, Inc.

The Files made with this system come with an .SMV extension, and is mainly intended for video email. The resulting video/sound file is extremely compressed, and small enough to upload over an AOL dial up connection. The quality may not up to the standard of an AVI or MPG file, but it is more than adequate for this client's specific needs. While experimenting with SMV files, most of resulting videos were between 1.5MB and 3MB in size. A few of the longer videos approached 6MB, but no larger. A big difference from a 20MB to 50MB AVI file.

Anyway, I'm probably not going to accept the job unless the client agrees to upgrade their Internet connection and hardware. Even with smaller video files, AOL on a dial up modem is a bad choice for a business that depends on efficient/reliable file transfers.

Dave

>>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?
>
>Did you check the format used by RealPlayer? I was surprised that the presentation used less space than a typical MP3 file (which is sound-only, but high-quality of course). MP3 takes about 1 MB per minute. I have downloaded a 3 1/2 hour presentation in RP format, which took about 120 MB. That's about 0.6 MB per minute.
>
>Hilmar.