There are often file size limits when using any free video hosting services. In my case, I had a 2 Gb mpeg file that I need to chop into two halves. It sounds like a very easy thing to do, but I couldn’t find a way to actually “chop” up the file. Below is how I did it in a copy-and-paste fashion.

First download VirtualDub. Oh, and if possible you really want to run this program on a fast computer. Time is precious as always.

Then in my case my file is encoded with MPEG-2, so I installed the MPEG-2 plugin first. You can download that from here. Just unzip the plugin file into your VirtualDub plugin directory. You can now open your input file without getting the weird error message.

Now you would want to install some kind of better codec to do video compression. I downloaded Xvid but it’s up to you which codec you prefer. Once installed, go to Video -> Compress, then pick Xvid or whatever your favorite codec is. My first half of the video with xvid gave me a 500M file, while without the video compress gave me a 17Gb file !!! No kidding!

Now you are ready to do the chopping. With the input file loaded, move the time cursor to where you want to do the chopping. Then find the arrow-looking buttons below the timeline. they should be at the rightmost. The left arrow will mark the beginning of a segment, the right arrow will mark the end of a segment. Once you are done marking, go to File -> Save Segmented AVI . Yea, I know it says AVI, but the output file will be in the format your compression method says. This will probably take quite a while. Meanwhile you may want to turn off the input and output video previews.

Here is another tutorial link.

I surely do hope there are easier ways to do video chopping.