"Bill in Co" wrote

| I'm not sure there really is an *equivalent* of Photoshop.

Paint Shop Pro

|For MS Office I'd say the same thing too,
| although there are some pretty good clones. WPS Office or Softmaker Free
| Office comes to mind. Or maybe LibreOffice. But, let's be honest - none
| of these are *equivalent*.
|
I'd agree Libre Office is not equal, but I would
say it's equivalent. If you're in a corporate job
where you need 100% consistency with MS Office
then you need MS Office. But if you just need to
do what MS Office can do then there's Libre Office.
Similarly with PSP. I think there's another option,
too, that used to be Mac-only, but I can't think of
the name now. I've been using PSP for 20 years.
I'm sure there's a filter or two that PS has and PSP
doesn't. But the main reason PS is a success is
the same reason MS Office is a success. They've
established a standard in business, with people
for whom wasting hundreds of dollars on overpriced
software is a bargain compared to not using the
standard.

| Yes, it means smaller files. A LOT smaller files due to *much* better
| compression. Something similar applies to WMV files, too: WMV9 is
vastly
| superior to WMV7.
|
| If these freebie programs are using the old codecs, then you're really not
| getting much. But ok, I'll concede they're at least better than MPG
| (mpeg2), for what that's worth. :-)
|

Interesting. I'd be curious to see someone do a
test, comparing the two. It sounds like you're
not sure whether it's old or not, but if something
else makes smaller files I'd be interested. Though at
this point, of all the things I tried that work on XP,
only Cute and the ByteScout program were without
problems. Bytescout also uses its own libraries
and saves as WMV9. But it did try to call an IP
at Cloudflare.

When I open the Cute video I made in Avidemux it
says codec 4CC: DIVX. VLC just says it's MPEG-4.
Encoded by Lavf54.63.104. That's all Greek to me.
I don't know anything about video encoding options.
You're saying that's outdated and much bigger than
it needs to be?

| Maybe somebody can
| investigate a few of their programs further.
|
| Like you, perhaps? If everyone tries some
| of them, we get a good sample.
|
| I'll think about it - perhaps moreso with regards to the "mp4 video
| converter", which I'd probably have more use for, since I'm not doing much
| "screencasting" these days. :-)
|
I was thinking more that you could try some of
these screen recorders. So far no one but me is
reporting tests. As for converting, I think Avidemux
or VLC can do most of that sort of thing.

| If compression is the most important factor to you, I don't think this is
| all that great. As I mentioned, it's not even using the h264 codec for
its
| mp4 files, from what was posted, so I feel it's a bit stuck in the stone
| age. :-) But it also might be why it is free, too.
|

Yes, but are you sure? It sounds like you
haven't actually tried it. And what's the stone
age? Are we talking 10% bigger? 500% bigger?
If you know about video formats then maybe
you can explain the difference here.