I make videos for my site and I currently export/compress them to WM9 at 512kb. Does anyone know of a way to increase the quality of the video while not increasing the size of the exported file so much?
You can't really INCREASE quality without increasing the file size, the two go hand in hand. xvid/divx are great compressors but unfortunately are still not widely known. For Quicktime I prefer MotionJPEG or Sorensen compressors and for AVI Indeo or Sorensen. To bring the filesize down I'll usually turn sound to mono (if there is sound), 16 bit at 22.050 kHz, which delivers nice quality sound. Then I turn off keyframes, that usually helps a lot. Then data rate, usually 200kbps with Sorensen. I usually bring the frame rate down to somewhere between 18 and 24, 15 if I really have to. If I still can't get a file size I like, then I'll reduce the dimensions by around 10% and lower all the settings I mentioned above one by one. Video compression sometimes takes a lot of trial and error, and even when you find good settings, you'll have to tweak them again next time as each video is always different.
Indeo reduces the contrast and colors a lot, it's highly NOT recommended. Reducing the sound to Mono, 22050 would be a very good idea, if your video contains mostly voices (an interview for example). A good bitrate for 22050 Hz mono would be about 28-32-48 kbps. Turning off keyframes will indeed reduce the file size a bit but players will have a very hard time jumping on a random position in the file. That's why you should only disable keyframes if you won't allow people to jump somewhere in the movie. XViD/Divx may not be widely know but the codecs are available on a larger computer base. MotionJPEG and Sorensen require users to install Quicktime, which I don't think it is that popular. If the lowest bitrate is required I would rather use Real Media format, not Quicktime. The Real Producer Basic is available for free on Real's site (for non-commercial use), you can encode media with acceptable quality at very low bitrates. Give it a try, you may like it.