I have just been given a new HD camcorder which saves the recordings to SD cards. They play brilliantly on my HD TV and I want to preserve them on the SD cards. However, it would be nice to pass some of them on to friends and family via email but their size being something like 229mb are far too large. I appreciate that to shrink them would lose quality but how do I reduce the mp4 files that they are saved in to say a wmv file which most people have on their pc's. Some software that is easy to work would be helpful. I use Windows Vista Premium. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Annie

Well for that you wouldn't actually need to reduce quality (as long as you have sufficient memory storage on whatever your using to transfer), you need only to convert them with a video converter. I can't recommend one because I've never wanted to convert anything to wmv, its just too uncommon, I generally convert to mp4. Someone else here probably has the answer.

To convert the file to something else use media coder its got a simple user interface and it should be able to convert just about any media files though if it cant recognize one just download cccp (combined community codec pack) its more streamlined than other codec packs. If you cant get the file small enough I believe 7zip can compress it and split it up into a bunch of smaller chunks that you can upload individually.



Media coder download select weather its a 32 or 64 bit os.

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/dlfull.htm

CCCP Just select the thing that says windows 2k/xp/vista blah blah blah

http://www.cccp-project.net/

Media coder tutorial its not perfect but its pretty good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Xrl0-D8vU

7-zip

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

With 7zip I think you just right click on the file and click add to archive than choose what kind of file you want it to be like zip or what ever but i think it has to be a .7z or .rar to be broken up into chunks. At the bottom you should see the option saying split to volumes bytes and type something like 10mb, if it needs it in bytes go to google and type what ever like 10 megabytes in bytes and it will calculate the result (or you could do the same at www.wolframalpha.com which is amazing by the way) and then make sure its saving this to a new folder or somewhere you can find it and that it wont fill with the tons of little peaces and click ok.

The most efficient codec is H264, but it’s demanding on resources. However, even with that, to reduce your 229mb to something that can be sent by email would make a right mess of the quality and probably create a bad impression of your filming abilities.

A better and easier approach is to zip/rar/7-zip the original file, upload it to a suitable (free) file host and give the download link by email. If you don’t want unauthorized viewing of your masterpiece, you can encode the zipped file. If you don’t know how to zip, just upload the file as it is.

Many, many thanks for all your suggestions. I probably try the zip idea first and see how I get on.
Cheers.
Annie

I would suggest you use a web site like humo.com. They allow you to store up to 5 GB's of data and 5 GB's of media on their servers for free. The files can be saved as private (only you have access) or public so you can use the generated link to send to your friends and allow them to download the file. That way you don't have to compromise the quality of the original by having to compress it.