# Best Compression for Low Bit-rate Video



## musashi1029 (Dec 4, 2008)

Hello.

I am trying to compress a low quality video (2fps, 0.1Mpixel).
Is there a particular compression format that works best with a low bit-rate video like mine? I am considering to use Motion JPEG or MPEG-2. Which one would have the better compression ratio?

Thank you in advance.


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## blah789 (Aug 25, 2008)

Anything will work for something like that. Codecs are really designed to shrink high res/high bitrate stuff. If you're trying to make your vid as small as possible try H264 or something. Otherwise, any other general purpose codec will do.


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## musashi1029 (Dec 4, 2008)

In fact, I forgot to mention one thing. That is, the compression will be handled either by a codec chip or a single board computer that has low computation power. Under this condition, I want to the compression format that has the highest compression ratio. Do you have any recommendation on that?


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## zuluclayman (Dec 16, 2005)

As Blah has said if your video is low quality, low bitrate at the moment most codecs will do the job - if you really want to play with compressing it down even more then download and install Auto Gordian Knot, compression software (link in my signature - its freeware so no cost) and use either the specified size or the percentage quality settings. I use the percentage quality setting set to between 50-60% and find that it brings video file sizes down quite a bit while still retaining good quality. You can choose to use the xVid or DivX codec - taste and try is the best method!


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## blah789 (Aug 25, 2008)

H264 has the highest compression ratio, but the problem is it's super-computationally intensive. Generally the higher the compression ratio, the higher the computation requirements for real-time decoding.


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