Down By The Bay – More Life With Kino

Well – I finally had some time to mess around with Kino again, after upgrading my PC to a dual core 64 Bit system.  One thing I can say – wow!  Much faster at rendering and exporting video than my previous system was!  I’m going to link to an approx. 2 minute video – the original raw video size is 424 MB.  It took only six minutes to export to a ‘mpeg’ file format compared to hours on my previous system.

But that doesn’t mean all is well.  I’m still trying to figure out how I can simply export a raw file to a smaller mpg format that would be suitable for downloading.  I’d think a 2 minute file could be less than 10 MB.  I even found a way to change the resolution of the video so that it is half the original size – but the resulting mpeg file is exactly the same as if it was the original resolution.

If you have a high speed connection and want to see the cutest 5 year old in the world singing “Down By The Bay,” click here. (UPDATE: WILL LOCATE THE MISSING FILE)

Note that this was after about four times of listening to the song.  I found an old “Silly Songs” CD that had been in a box for probably a decade, and thought I’d play it for David.  He loved “Down By The Bay,” and by his fourth time of “Can we play it again, Dad?” I thought I’d get out the video camera.  The lighting is bad – it’s all behind David so there is a wee bit of glare.  And he was sitting on my lap, so getting a good shot of him wasn’t the easiest – but here you go anyhow.

And if you know anything about Kino, and can explain to me how to reduce the file size considerably, that would be awesome!  I tried a utility that likely uses ‘ffmpeg’ – but not only does the default “low quality mpg” choice result in an even larger file size than the mpeg format, the sound is 100% messed up with only a loud buzz coming from the speakers.
I don’t know much about video formats and the more I try to learn, the more confused I get.  There seem to be about 4 different ‘mpeg’ formats alone, and at least 2 avi formats – neither of which are compatible with standard video codecs universally. Or so I am lead to believe.

Back to “Down By The Bay,” – the “wee man” fell asleep in my lap about 15 minutes after his performance.  He had a chance to watch the movie that he wondered if it was “good.”