compressing movies?

[mhavlat]

how do i compress movie files without hindering their quality?

thanks

[kluelos]

You do not, and can not. Modern digital video formats are already as compressed as they can be. So it's utterly pointless to use WinRar or GZip or any other archiver, to try to compress a movie. The output will be just as large as the input, after a whole lot of wasted time for you and for everyone who downloads it.

Much older formats, like video DVD's, can be "ripped", recompressed into a modern format like DivX, with unnoticeable loss of quality. It is a truism, though, that any recoding will cause SOME quality loss. Audio as well as video. If you're careful and know what you're doing, you can keep the loss to very small levels.

Now if you're very hip, and know a lot about what you're doing, then you can cut the filesize down -- but hey, if you know that much, you don't need to ask the question.