AVI to MPEG4 conversion

Given the huge size of AVI files being produced by my digital camera even for 2-3 mins videos (ranging around 45+MB in size), I need to figure out if there are better compression algorithms out there. Looks like MPEG-4 may be a better choice, however my camera (Canon A510) doesn't record in that format.

While I still have to completely understand all the various formats and their pros/cons, I decided to check out conversion utilities available out there. Most of them are substantial $$, mediacoder is freeware and uses a good amount of conversion encoders freely available.

Now to the interesting part - I tried converting a 50MB AVI file to MPEG-4 format and the conversion period started increasing from 600hrs to 1200hrs to 2000+hrs on an intel mobile centrino 1.6GHz processor with 512MB RAM. I just gave up - understandably.

Either I'm missing something, the tool is wrong, estimation is screwed up, or it's just not worth doing it in software.

Anyone done this earlier and has better inputs/insight ?

YouTube uploads fail intermittently

I started using YouTube about two days ago for private video uploads and sharing. I discovered that uploads have been freezing in between ever since y'day. I don't know if this is a function of some inherent builtin limit on YouTube's end (for daily uploads from a single user) or this is some bandwidth constraint imposed by my service provider (Airtel) or something else totally unrelated.

I'm however still able to download relatively large files without issues (so download bandwidth may not necessarily have been breached yet, at my current levels of consumption).

Uploads to YouTube of files 50MB or lesser have been freezing anywhere between 20% to 70% completion.

Anyone else noticed this ? Any known issues / workarounds ?

At the moment, I've been unable to upload any video completely since last evening (Saturday, 10-Mar-2007). FWIW, I was able to upload 6 videos in all since I began the whole process.