heh, Want me to teah ya on msn?
Hmm you aren't online, so anyway I'll first start by recommending some softwares.
1. Winavi Good for storing files. It gets the rm files done quite well without too much loss of quality. Quite n00bish seeing as it doesnt give you the full control over your encoding settings.
2. Xilisoft Video converter. It gives you a lot of control over settings such as bitrates and audio settings and stuff, however it doesnt have rm support.
3. Easy Real Converter. Good for rm files. However not much else can be said about it.
If you are just wodnering about decreasing file size then all files you encode must be in rm. Seeing as rm = one-thirds of avi or any other.
I wouldn't quite recommend learning much about mpeg files since they're pretty useless unless you want to burn VCDs, which dont exist nowadays
For XVid, you'll have to get the separate plugins for Winavi. Which has some cool Xvid conversion settings.
Remember what you're encoding for. Whether its for saving file size or for keeping quality. I think you're going into the file size with quality mode. So for that, choose either divX or Xvid with the minimum quality setting at 75% or preferably 80%.
Don't decrease frame rates as that only makes a crappy video.
The bit rates are good to tinker with till you find the perfect settign yo need. If you've seent eh DBZ low quality episodes that runa round the net, well those have bit rates of 300.
DVD movies have bitrates of nearly 1500.
Remember that all these are the video settings.
Audio is a whole together different thing.
Dont mess with stereo/monoo effects. That just makes the sound crazy. However for anime a setting of mono is better than stereo simply because you don't have theatric audio fx in anime.
In music videos however, keep them to stereo unless you want to lose the song quality.
Keep audio bitrates at 128 for voice and at 192 or higher for songs.
Personally, I leave audio as it is and mess with video.
Oh and video dimensions. Never resize to 320x240 or something lower unless you want to put videos into an ipod.
But dont stretch the file dimensions either.
A common misconception of videos is that if you stretch a video's dimensions, its file quality increases. That is crap. It does. it looks just how it would if you resized in while it played in media player classic or in VLC player. Yeah itll look bad.
But your videos dont need to be 1024x768 either. at 640x480 theyll be good enough.
Oh yeah always dont change the ratio setting.
Dont make 4:3 (Normal monitors) into 16:9 (Widescreen)! Thats the WORST THING you could do.
