I am the (amateur) manager of a small community TV station. We run automation via Deltatrax software (out of Holland).

I am always looking for better ways to to compress files at high quality to minimize hard disk space and, as such, have probably tried every shareware, freeware and commercial piece of software (<$100) that I could find.

Most work OK but with severe limitations. My favorites are Mpeg streamclip, Visual hub and ffmpegX (on the mac), Super and MPEGstreamclip on the PC with occasional use of Medicoder from Stanley Huang which works well on certain files but chokes on others.

Needless to say I have more codecs installed than anyone should and I'm currently experimenting with the 3ivx 4.5 codec which is giving me excellent picture results - though I seem to be having audio problems (as in NO audio) - a work in progress and the problems are probably between my ears as opposed to in the silicone (I did mention Amateur right off the top).

I also recently purchased an Apple TV and am now trying to convert my various movies and pieces of interesting footage into a format that works there too. This is where I am having problems which I will post separately but it involves converting from .mov QT files to H264 MP4 files. The mov files are already MP4 (usually XVid) but when I convert to vanilla MP4 they quadruple in size (i.e. 375 MB becomes 1.3 GB). This makes no sense but there you go - my current problem.

Stephen