[playogg-discuss] huge file size with clips converted to Ogg Theora! How to fix?

[Fyodor Vassiley]

Hi all

I am a podcast video producer (about 3000 end user subscribers) and
wish to support the PlayOGG campaign.

I downloaded videos off YouTube as MP4 (Firefox ->
Greasmonkey-Userscript) or as FLV, for example from MySpaceTV.

I converted both MP4 (Youtube) and FLV (MySpace) with ffmpeg2theora
(on Mac OS X 10.5.7) to Ogg Theora.

I noticed two things:

- the transcoding to Ogg Theora is slower comparing to other codecs.
But this is not a problem for me.

- The file size with Ogg Theora is huge. This cost bandwidth $$$.
>From 22M to 58M and from 15M to 29M

How to solve this issue? Do I something wrong?

$ ffmpeg2theora test_youtube_dl_mp4.mp4
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'test_youtube_dl_mp4.mp4':
  Duration: 00:05:07.47, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 602 kb/s
    Stream #0.0(und): Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16
    Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 480x360, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 60 tbc
  Resize: 480x360
      0:05:07.45 audio: 56kbps video: 1531kbps, time elapsed: 00:08:54

$ ls -lrth test_youtube_dl_mp4.*
-rw-r--r--  1 fyodor  staff    22M May 18 20:09 test_youtube_dl_mp4.mp4
-rw-r--r--  1 fyodor  staff    58M May 22 21:03 test_youtube_dl_mp4.ogv


$ ffmpeg2theora test_myspacetv_dl_flv.flv
Input #0, flv, from 'test_myspacetv_dl_flv.flv':
  Duration: 00:04:35.48, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 96 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: vp6f, yuv420p, 480x360, 30 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, stereo, s16, 96 kb/s
  Resize: 480x368
[mp3 @ 0x1002600]mdb:255, lastbuf:0 skipping granule 0
      0:04:35.48 audio: 40kbps video: 832kbps, time elapsed: 00:04:43

$ ls -lrth test_myspacetv_dl_flv.*
-rw-r--r--@ 1 fyodor  staff    15M May 22 21:02 test_myspacetv_dl_flv.flv
-rw-r--r--  1 fyodor  staff    29M May 22 21:12 test_myspacetv_dl_flv.ogv

cheers
Fyodor