The video format you need depends upon the application you’re going to put it to. So if you want a video with all the data for editing, AVI is the best option. If you need to save space and yet retain the quality, opt for formats that use some sort of compression, like MPEG, DivX or even MPEG 4. As it’s not possible to discuss all of them, we’ll talk about the most-popular ones here.

Whenever you convert a video from one format to another, there will be some irretrievable loss in video quality. That’s why for most video editing work and conversions, AVI is used as the base format. To get the best AVI file, you’ll need a good quality video capture card or Webcam that doesn’t drop too many frames during video capture. With these base guidelines in mind, let’s proceed with the various conversions. Also, keep in mind that different video formats use their own codecs for compression and decompression.

AVI to MPEG-1

When you record from a source, say a TV card, a video capture card, a digital video camera or even from a Beta-cam, the associated software records the video in raw, uncompressed AVI format most of the time (though sometimes a simple codec may be used). An AVI file takes up a lot of hard disk space and is not always feasible if you want to put it on a CD. For that, it’s better to store the video on a VCD. For this you need to convert it to MPEG-1 format. Simple programs like ‘avi2vcd’ are available to help you do this. Just select the file to be encoded and the output path and hit Encode. You have the option of selecting the output standard viz PAL, NTSC or Film. The MPEG file thus created can be burnt on a CD using any of the commonly available CD burning software like Adaptec or Nero.

AVI to MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is more popular than MPEG-1 for storing digital video as it gives higher data rate and hence better quality. For encoding to this format ‘bbMPEG’ is a good software. Apart from encoding, the software lets you do basic editing, like cropping image frames and changing the final movie’s resolution in terms of its height and width. The output video will not be as smooth and detailed as the original because of compression, so don’t choose a higher resolution than the original. Otherwise, you’ll get a ‘blocky’ video. bbMPEG can also be used to convert MPEG-1 streams to MPEG-2.

MPEG to AVI and ASF

Why would you want to convert MPEG to AVI? One reason could be if you want to stream your video, for which MPEG can’t be used. For that, the MPEG has to be converted to an ASF (Advanced Streaming Format) file. Since there aren’t too many utilities that let you convert from MPEG to ASF, you’ll first have to convert it to AVI. For this, a utility called ‘VirtualDub’ is available. The process is time consuming. After converting to AVI, use Microsoft’s Windows On-Demand Producer for converting the AVI to ASF format. The utility is part of Windows 2000. Microsoft NetShow Tools has the NetShow Encoder, that can do the same, but we found the former a lot easier and better.