The VideoLAN Forums

I have recorded telephone conversations (mp3) that are about an hour long that I play with VLC. I want to email these recordings to someone. They are about 28MB - 23MB if I put them in a zipped folder. I'm assuming this is too large a file to send by email.

What are my options to send these files? Can they be compressed or do I need to use an online service?

VLC 1.1.7

Not really VLC related, however you could re-compress them further at a lower bitrate. 28MB is a large file to email... might be able to though (Gmail might handle it for example). Alternatives are splitting it into parts - e.g. into 10MB/5MB split RAR or 7-Zip archives, or just uploading to a File Sharing site.

Finally, Dropbox with a shared folder could work.

Arite.

AMR or Speex are probably most efficient codecs for voice. There is no point in compressing audio files with general purpose archive formats like ZIP; the result is usually poor compression.

In any case, you should not transmit large files over emails, since it intrinsically increases the file size by 33%, contrary to HTTP or FTP or anything else.

Well, you could try uploading them on some file host like 4shared, file serve or even rapidshare. And you can just send them the link and they could start downloading it through that. But that opens the file to users, which you probably would not like. I am not sure if you can set it to private, if you are on a free account. But I am sure if you are subscribed, you would have that option.

This may be a late response but Gmail provides each account with 7+ gigs.. yes gigabytes. Without an online service, I would use WinRAR's 'best compression' method which has been known to shrink filesize by 67%. That would bring your filesizes from ~25mb to ~8mb without affecting quality.