new user needs a little help please!

[richlear]

Hello - wonder if someone can give me some advice. I am using VLC 1.17 under Windows 7 and want to do something relatively simple ( I think!)

I want to capture video/audio from my laptop webcam and write to a file suitable for download from a website. I have played around and see that I can stream a defined capture device to a file but I am confused by all the selections of video codecs/formats etc.

Can someone give me some pointers to the best combination of video format/codec to use to get a reasonable compromise between quality & file size?

Thanks in advance

Rich

[McDuff426]

Hi Rich, A newbie at VLC myself and noticed your question without any response, I do not have a definitive answer for you but know how you can find it. The thing I found so attractive within the VLC project is the object of total interoperability and uniform performance regardless of platform, the real object of W3C, free exchange of information for everybody.

Google is a wonderful research tool, for instance I just STFW "video format and codec vs file size" (0.10 seconds) which returned this page < http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=ldy ... bd614e0a97>
I believe you'll find what you want here < http://websitehelpers.com/video/> , as well as other resources. You just have to make sure your solutions are compatible with VLC, your platform and your host. I'm not trying to be a smart a** but in life there are questions and answers no secrets other than knowing the right question to ask.

Although this is rather tedious reading, anybody interested in succeeding should be acquainted with Eric S. Raymond's writing, particularly < http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html >

It's an amazing world, all this knowledge is at our fingertips the real challenge is learning how to use it,
Cheers and success!