knowing which vids can be reduced

[nordic bro]

I have a boatload of instructional poker videos that I can't figure out which can or can't be reduced in size (they're wmv, 640w to 1280w, 35M to 200M in size).

They are all strictly voice audio so I've been able to chop them down somewhat by using mencoder to strip out the audio, run the wav through low-qual lame and merge back.

Some of the videos I can also drastically reduce in size by re-encoding w/divx + a bitrate of ~400-500. Oddly though some I do this on balloon and get even bigger than the originals.

So what I'm looking for is some way to identify those where I can trim the video bitrate/chop down the video's size but avoid wasting time doing that to those that will just get bigger than the orig by doing so.

I tried midentify but I usually see this:

ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=215512

or this:

ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=0


Most of them have the latter so I guess this isn't going to work.

So can anyone tell me a good way w/o having to load each video to see whether or not the video portion will benefit from re-encoding?

[nordic bro]

thought I'd dp another lap, see if anyone knows this. It doesn't have to be an mplayer thing, if there's some small util I can use to get a vdeo's bitrate that would be a big help.

One other thing is that I'm no video expert so I'm only guessing about this bitrate thing. Some of these videos I have there's a big black empty-space border around the videos I'd like to chop out buit w/mencoder apparently the only way to crop the empty border is to re-encode and what happens is I go from a 50M video with black borders to a 100M video without them.

So if this is something other than a bitrate problem I'm all ears.