I'm looking for either a free download or a reasonably priced software that I can use to compress AVI for the internet. Does anybody have any suggestions?? I'm looking for something that has variable quality / compression.
Thanks again!!
Dean

The best I know is Carbon Coder or Procoder. At the cheap end there is Mediacoder.

Dean, first question is what format do you want to create? (Quicktime, Windows Media, Flash, Real Media, DIVX)

Most of the compression software out there can create similar quality. Vegas does fine with Windows Media and Quicktime out of the box.

Why? Compression software is usually built on Software Development Kits (SDKs) supplied by eg. Microsoft, Apple or Real.

Flash is a little different - Macromedia/Sorenson (?) made the Spark codec freely available, but the newer (and much better) VP6 codec is costly, and VP6 encoding is not supported by Vegas, other NLEs or freeware.

The next question is what features do you want bundled with your compression software? Vegas bundles full audio/video editing and processing and access to most of the available encoder controls. Sorenson Squeeze and most software sold for compression have *very* sophisticated batch manager capabilities, as well as sophisticated processing controls.

The freeware Windows Media Encoder has no batching, no audio/video processing other than interlace and pull-down, but exposes every encoder control.

So... specifically, what is it you want to do?

The freeware Windows Media Encoder has no batching, no audio/video processing other than interlace and pull-down, but exposes every encoder control.

Not sure if it is what you mean, but Windows Media Encoder is fully automatable via traditional Windows methods. Hence, you could write a VBScript that automates it or do it from Excel, Word etc (i.e., any app with Visual Basic for Applications) etc. I've used it quite a bit that way.

I have the vegas movie maker (not the fully version) and it does have the fuction where you can covert avi file to the internet, but I've tried it and can't get it to work...Do you have any suggestions on how to convert a rendered movie file?

Windows Movie Maker is free and does a pretty good job creating mpegs for the web.

I have the vegas movie maker...

Do you mean Vegas Movie Studio or Windows Movie Maker?
No matter which one you have, it should allow for rendering as a WMV file as that's what you'd want for an internet clip.

Windows Movie Maker is free and does a pretty good job creating mpegs for the web.

Windows Movie Maker only allows for saving as a DV-AVI or WMV files, not MPEG.

Hush ma mouth. I meant WMV.

It still does the job.

I've used Super, lets you encode to many formats:

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html