Dumb question about archiving very large files

[SarahtheBoring]

So my hard drive is starting to accumulate the final HuffYUV exports of all my old vids, which are, y'know, a gig or so each. They're not doing me any active good just sitting around. I don't want to toss them entirely just in case I might want to re-encode one and don't want to rebuild the whole vid (I do have the project files burned onto CD, but some of the older ones were made with incomplete vobs and so that wouldn't do me much good). And 1G is too big to fit on a CD-R, or at least the ones I have.

I haven't tried zipping them yet because I didn't know if it would compress them enough to fit on a CD. And annoying you guys is faster than attempting it just as a test.

So.

My question is.

1. will zipping compress a 1G HuffYUV file down to the neighborhood of 700MB

and if not,

2. what would you suggest for archiving these things otherwise?

My hard drive and I thank you.

[EBwiz]

I haven't tried it, but I seriously doubt zipping it will do the job.

You can always use virtualdub or a similar program to split the Huffy source into parts, and burn them onto seperate CDs, then take them off and put them together again if you need to, but that might take alot of CDs, however, it's the best suggestion I can come up with. I hope it helps at least a little.

[CArnesen]

I would zip up the file into multiple files by "spanning disks" (700 MB each) and then burn those to CDR.

--Chris ^_^

[TaranT]

I would zip up the file into multiple files by "spanning disks" (700 MB each) and then burn those to CDR.

This is probably the cheapest way to go (an external hard drive would be the easiest method if your PC has USB2 ports).
This is a shareware program that supports disk spanning: http://www.tucows.com/preview/194276.html

[Arigatomina]

The other option (expensive route) would be to get a dvd burner - you can fit around 4 gigs on that instead of the 700mb limit for cds. But I'd agree with some of the others - just do a direct stream copy with Vdub and cut your files in half - if the original is under 1.5gigs you should be able to get each vid on 2 discs. Not too bad.

[Zarxrax]

There's a lossless codec called vble which gets a little better compression than huffy.
I usually just save HQ versions of my videos as MPEG2 and Xvid at quantizer 1. These are good enough quality for me.

[SarahtheBoring]

Thanks for all the ideas.

I remember spanning from the days of floppies. Heheh. I think what would be easiest at the moment is probably splitting up the file in VDub. I'll have to try that.

Thanks!

[Lyrs]

Here's an idea:

create some 10 thousand free email/webhost accoutns and then split your file into at 10 thosuand some. email/upload all you mini-cuts.

heh

[Tab.]

I would suggest getting the newest ffvfw and using the developmental lossless codec FFV1. It's in development, so a later version might not read files from this version, so you should probably put the installer on the CD too. But FFV1 can be like 2 times smaller than the best Huffyuv.

Try encoder type: AC and the rest of the stuff default. If I knew more about the damn thing, I'd have better settings advice. I know context=2 gives me smaller files, but it could be slightly lossy for all I know. I don't even know what the keyframe thing is about. Just stick to defaults + AC.

That should get a nice fit on one CD.

[SarahtheBoring]

Blah, blah, blah, I'm the first kid on the block with all the obscure toys, blah, blah, blah.

That would work just fine for someone who wants to spend weeks <s>pumping their egos</s> fucking around with programs and codecs, though. 8)

Splitting with VDub and burning to CD is working fine for me. Oh dear, practicality is so un1337.