I would like to send an email with a video attachment. However, my email program limits attachments to no more than 50 MB in size. The clip I'd like to send is 148 MB in size, and it's a .mov file (Quicktime). Is there a way to "compress" the file so that I can still attach it to the email and send it? I've heard of something called "WinZip" or something like that.

Thanks for your help!

A Quicktime movie has already been compressed to it's smallest size at that sound and image quality. I don't think zipping it would help substantially (but I'm not sure). WinZip is a free program, so it wouldn't hurt to try. You can compress it more with a video program, but there will be a loss in quality. At 1/3 of its current size, I would suspect it would be degraded a lot. Is it something that you could cut up into pieces? How about overnighting a CD?

Windows moviemaker gives you the option

That's a LOTTA megabytes. Zip won't do much for you.

But you could upload it to a service like rapidshare and let your recipient dsownload it from there.

Any way to break it into manageable chunks, and either let the recipient reassemble it, or watch it in "chapters"?

As said above, video formats are already compressed so zipping them won't help. This is also true for jpg and other images.

You can either make the file smaller by reducing the resolution/quality/framerate or split it.

WinZip (and other compressions programs I'm sure) give you the opportunity to split the compressed file into chunks. Maybe you could split the file into 4 chunks and send them individually to be rejoined at the other end.

FWIW you can't email binary files. It just can't be done. So email servers/programs encode binary files into ASCII format and send them that way. This just about doubles the size of the file being transmitted.

I'd reduce the file size if practical.

You email any text you want, including no text at all, and include the binary file as an attachment.

A very dangerous phrase!

Try sending it via yousendit.com, a great free FTP service.

I would second rapidshare. Use it a lot, always satisfied

I used rapidshare.com to send three of the video files. The one file that I'm having trouble sending through any method is 148 MB in size. None of my email accounts nor even rapidshare allow files to be larger than 100 MB.

Rapidshare was a great suggestion, and it was fairly easy to use. And free!

Thanks for the help!

Burn it to a CD and mail it if you're just sharing with 1 or 2 people.

Use some free utility to break it into 2 parts and Rapidshare it, directing your recipients where to get the same utility to paste it back together (then they can delete the utility if they wish) - try this one http://www.download.com/Star-Downloader-......=lst-0-2 or try this one http://www.download.com/Split-Files/3000......=lst-0-1

There's a nice utility to split avi or wmv video files into smaller, stand-alone chapters - http://www.download.com/Stoik-Video-Conv......=lst-0-3

If you have a website, upload the file to your website - create a page with a link to the file - then, there's no need to allow just anybody to navigate to it - just leave the page unlinked to anyplace, and tell your recipients the page's unique address - they can "right click and save" - delete it when they have gotten it.

For those who doubt my very off topic 'you can't email binary files' please read the SMTP white papers. SMTP will only send text. That is all it will do, no matter who you are or what email program you use.

As I mentioned non text files (ie binary) need to be encoded, this converts them to plain text so that SMTP can send them. This effectively doubles the size of the email as it is transmitted, increasing the time taken to send it. This can also fool server size limits that bounce over sized emails.

You may not like my over dramatic phrasing but the fact is SMTP will only send plain text.

Any way...

I like the idea of Ross's split it into chapters, that sounds like a very worth while program, I'm off to DL it now

All I know is that when I send an Internet Explorer email, it has the option of one or more file attachments in any format at all.

I dunno whether, in the background, it turns the attachment into that lovely SMTP text we used to see when downloading photos from newsgroups - and it doesn't matter, really. It does it in the background, and it has its limitations, but it can be used to send anything from a .jpg of your kitty to a movie of your baby to an audio file of your favorite tune - ANY format.

If you doubt it, send me your email address and I will send you a message with all three file types attached.

My computer is not able to burn CDs. When I custom-ordered my computer from Dell a couple years ago, I elected to not have that capability because I never have a need to burn CDs -- until now.

Someone told me that any local drugstore's photo department/lab will be able to burn the 148 MB video file onto a CD for me. All I have to do is take my camera's memory card into the store and ask them to do it. I will try this.