Well, I have a 1.7gig video, and I dont have a dvd burner. If I did, I would just put it onto a dvd and not be making this thread.
Anyways, I need to compress this to 700mb or smaller, with keeping the video size the same, and keeping the quality pretty decent. I know compressing it into a Xvid usually gets a pretty small and quality video.
I just need to know a good program to use that is hopefully free, and can easily compress the almost 2gig video to something waaay smaller. 
dvd shrink
and fo mo moovies go to www.torrentspy.com and search for “tus” without the commas. itll give u torrents for all the latest movies and all of em fit onto a cd. all kick ass quality no viruses. works on dvd players that support vcd.
Im not looking to downloading movies or anything.
I have a AVI files of 1.7gigs, and just need a good way to compress it to a smaller size, so I just need a good program or way to do this and hopefully get it to 700mbs or smaller as to fit onto a cd.
It seems DVD shrink is only for DVDs and not for any other type of files. Im gonna download it and see if will accept another file type though.
try googleing the problem, find a well known commercial program and download that from th same site. i have one that converts bu doesnt compress:)
I tried opening my file and it wouldnt open in the program. 
Ill keep googling for a good program then find the torrent to it, or hopefully find a free one that wont leave a watermark. 
Are you looking to put the video on a CD as a backup just in case the original gets lost or needs to be restored. Or are you looking for something that will fit the video on a single CD and still be playable.
Pretty much fit the cd onto a single cd and still be playable.
If I had a bigger hardrive, I wouldnt mind a file this large sitting on it, but my hardrive is a pretty old 20gig, and this video takes a good chunk out of it. lol
You can use an archive program like 7-Zip to archive it and split the archive to fit on several CDs. Then you’d be able to restore the original file later if you ever need to.
Then you can work on recompressing the video to a 700MB file that can fit on a single CD.
Never thought about doing that, even though I do that with tons of game programs that are around 2gigs or larger.
I found a program called blaze media pro, and I finally got SUPER to work, so ill mess with all 3 of these and find the best fix.
Experiment with SUPER. It can do H.264 which will give you the best (or near the best) quality for given bitrate or file size. The resulting H.264 video should be playable in QuickTime or any other video player that supports H.264.
I don’t know if SUPER has a feature that will automagically figure out the compression ratios needed to fit a video on a CD. You might have to do those calculations by hand or search for a video calculator application that can do that for you.
Thanks, usually I stick with Mpeg-2 and 4. Ill try the H.264.
take parts of it onto a flash drive
As for me for this task I use VidCrop
http://www.geovid.com/VidCrop/
yes it costs but gives real good quality on output.
Forgot I made this.
With the right settings I compressed the 1.7ish gig video to 75megs. Sweet quality too. =p
What software did you end up using?
SUPER.