How can I compress TiVo files?

[jwaite80]

Looking to compress football games onto 4.7 GB DVD's. What programs are good to do this without losing too much quality?

[greg_burns]

Looking to compress football games onto 4.7 GB DVD's. What programs are good to do this without losing too much quality?

For playback on a home DVD player or computer?

For computer (unless you have a DivX DVD player), Divx Converter comes to mind. TivoDesktop Plus has some built-in compression options if you want to take the easy road.

If you want to compress them to fit on regular DVD's for playback in a normal DVD player... Get VideoRedo ($50) to cut commercials and use DVDStyler + DVDShrink (both free).

[petew]

TiVo files are encrypted MPEG2 so they are already compressed. Probably the only option to reduce the size of the file without losing quality would be convert the .tivo file into regular MPEG and then use DivX or similar to re-encode the video as MPEG 4.

Depending on how many games you want to archive and for how long, a big disk drive or drives may be a better option. A 300Gb EIDE (PATA) disk is <$100 these days and can be added to the Tivo directly or added to a networked computer and accessed through TivoDesktop or Galleon.