Question - Video Compression

[HeRo]

Yo! So I'm very new when it comes to compression, I literally just learned the existence of other compressor just 4 days ago My question would what is the best way to compress a video. So I have here my iPad recorded videos that I want to compress and keep, it has a bunch of good memories so I wouldn't dare to delete it. The file format is .MOV and is 6.19 GB, I tried to compress it with FreeArc with Maximum compression and it finished with 6.24 GB.

Do we have something specialized with video compression here, or should I convert the videos first?

Thanks in advance!

Also, the forum's search function does not seem to work, or is it just me?

[m^2]

If you're a regular user, no there's probably no way to get reasonable size reduction with reasonable effort and no quality loss.
"Reasonable" is subjective as some find fun in it, but unless you *really* do, don't bother, there's nothing that can help you ATM. It's a branch of a hot research topic (treatment of already compressed data), a barely explored one.

[Matt Mahoney]

Generally you can't compress data that is already compressed.

That's not strictly true. You can decompress data and compress it with a better (but slower) algorithm. JPEG and MPEG are designed to be fast and there are compressors that will squeeze out another 30%. Also, there are things like precomp for zip and deflate format which appears in lots of places like png, pdf, docx, xlsx, and a bunch of other file types. It decompresses and saves information to recompress it. Then you can apply a better compressor to it.

MOV (quicktime) is a proprietary format as far as I know and there aren't any compressors for it that I know of.

[HeRo]

So my best shot would be converting/changing the video format itself? If so, what video format can you guys suggest?

[jethro]

So my best shot would be converting/changing the video format itself? If so, what video format can you guys suggest?

x264

[m^2]

x264 or VP8. Just be aware that each transcoding to a non-lossless format reduces image quality. No exceptions.
ADDED:
So my recommendation is to leave it as it is. A couple of years from now the saving will be worth nothing and the quality loss will be irreversible.