DivX I don't think is fre, unless things changed dramatically since last time I checked. Xvid is free though. And other mpeg4 type codecs can be found free too. ffmpeg comes with the mpeg4 embedded in the program itself. (sh-weet!). www.ffmpeg.org - but it's a comman-line tool. I love it though, teaches you a thing or two about non-gui use of the computer, creating simple batch scripts (convert.bat) and such. And it has great quality controls.

There's also a bunch of good codec packs at www.free-codecs.com - including the XPcodecpack, which includes one of the many Xvid builds too (Koepi's I think)

Oh, and indeed DivX 7.2 is shown there, so that's probably free now ;-)  awesome.

ya never cease to learn  LOL

I think Quicktime has a compressor called 'Animation' which is lossless. But doesn't drastically reduce filesize. Unless you have just a few colors indeed, so the run-length encoding algorithm can pull a few tricks. If you render Poser in cartoon style against plain background it might be quite good.

I do agree that as long as you're looking at a working document, you should use a lossless compressor, or uncompressed. Also for another reason: be aware that some (many?) codecs put certain restriction on the content: such as color depth, bits per pixel, and most importantly width and height. Or even frame rate. Mpeg for example has only a few specific framerates. mpeg4 is better. But many also require that you use an even number of pixels in width and/or height. Or multiples of 4, 8 even.

Keep that in mind if you ever use a tool to select a rectangular area from your clip and crop to that. If you selected an odd or non-conforming size, saving to the AVI file later at that size might fail. Be sure to know the caveats of your chosen codec, or experiment a lot. And never toss away the uncompressed original. You can 7-zip it nicely, or use iceows which often gives better (and yet lossless)  compression than zip as it's wavelet based, like mpeg4 in some math ways.

Also, some video players may behave differenty: WIndows Media Player may fail to play a particular clip while another player might be more forgiving and play it nonetheless. SO be qell equipped with a choice of several players. SUch as Irfanview (which can also extract frames to BMP image sequnce), Media Player Classic (from the above-mentioned free-codecs site), Quicktime (I recommend getting Pro), .... again ffmpeg comes to mind too if you need to 'recover' a botched clip size and extract frames, perhacps not even all frames, perhaps only one every 20 rames or every 2 seconds... very powerful.

-Philip

www.thebest3d.com - beyond digital painting