Anyone know what I can use to cut a specific portion of a video, shrink it and send it via email. I tried shrink but a two minute clip came out 90mb.

rip the dvd to avi using AutoGordianKnot or FairuseWizard (or similar).
Edit the portion you want with Virtualdub.

How hard is it to work this program. I heard Nero Vision works too..

No, Nerovision will make an avi into a dvd, not the other way around.
FairuseWizard is easy, AGK a little more complicated (but free).

1st post here (came for firmware advice - but stumbled into here)

Moving large files on the internet sometimes requires some lateral thinking.

2 minutes of DVD is always going to be too large to email no matter how you compress it. In fact a lot of ISP's and IT Managers are now placing 10Mb limits on attachmnet sizes.

Software aside if you can re-capture the footage at 1/4 size it should be mailable, or alternatively set up an FTP Server and get the other person to download it from your PC/Server (if you have a large webspace you could upload it there and get the other person to download it - thats what we do).

If the other person only needs to see the footage you could convert it to a 'streaming' format so they can just watch it online.

Hope this gives you some ideas...

1/4 size (video aspect) has nothing to do with filesize.
Filesize is based on compression, and bitrate.
DVD's are mpeg-2, uncompressed mostly.
AVI's are a container for compressed video, DivX and XviD being the most common compressions, and are much smaller.
Use XviD compression, at a low bitrate, and you can get a smaller filesize.
If you want really small (at a loss in quality), try Windows movie maker, and save them as .wmv for email.

Oh, believe me, MPEG2 is still some pretty heavy compression. Uncompressed AVI video can easily be more than 128Mbps.

OK, now we've gone and confused the issue even more.
Yes, mpeg-2 is compressed, yes uncompressed avi's are large.
So what?

Hi,

What you need is a utility called Cutstream(freeware, assuming all you want to cut is less than 20 secs) and convert it using the countless encoders(free and pay) to whatever format(whatever suits you) you want and send it.

Hope this helps.