HOWTO shrink movies from your digital camera (Canon A610)

I think you have already noticed that the size of the movies recorded with your camera is a bit to large. So a normal thing to think is how to reduce the size of these movies with as little loss in quality as possible.

First,
you need to install the ffmpg. You do this as simple as this. Open terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Now navigate in terminal to the folder where your movie is located (let's say its called movie.avi) and type:

ffmpeg -i movie.avi -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -r 20 -s 640x480 movie1.avi

This will give you a movie named movie1.avi with one tenth of original movie size and no noticable loss in quality.

Let me explain the command for you so you can modify it yourself.

ffmpeg - starts the program
-i movie.avi - this is the input file
-ab 56 - sets audio bitrate of the output file, in kbit/s
-ar 22050 - sets audio sampling rate of the output file, in Hz
-r - sets frame rate of the output file, in Hz (this value will effect the final size the most, so play with it to get the best result for yourself)
-s - sets resolution of the output file
movie1.avi - name of the output file

That's it. If you have some problems you're free to post it in comments.