how much space is actually used?

[TheRingmaster]

how much space does a 360 MB avi file actually take up?

[aysiu]

Is this a trick question?

[TheRingmaster]

well I've seen some things that download 100MB but only take up 50MB (just an example).

Edit: how would I compress that avi file and have it still play in totem?

[GuitarHero]

A file that's 360mb is going to take up 360mb, unless you get a video compression program of some sort to make it smaller.

[djsroknrol]

360MB would be roughly 1/3 of a 1GB HD....if that helps...

[kate99]

360MB is not 360Mb exactly. it has a difference. might be 348, 357.5 but not exactly 360.

[kate99]

sometimes it doesn't actually take up a complete 360, it will be between 348-359 MB.

[daou]

360MB / 1.024 = 351.5625 MB used. But I believe it also depends on your cluster size, although this really only has a big effect on large numbers of small files.

[M7S]

well I've seen some things that download 100MB but only take up 50MB (just an example).

Edit: how would I compress that avi file and have it still play in totem?
The only case where something is a 100 mb download and then only takes up 50 mb, that I could think of is cd-images. When you download a cd-image it's always bigger than the actual files on the cd are when you've burned the cd-image. I've heard of extreme cases when a cd with 50 mb data resulted in a 700 mb image.

An avi-file is just an file though and should not change it's size.

[TheRingmaster]

okey dokie, thanks for your help

[bom28]

Some file systems can write files in sparse mode, with this mode applications can create a huge empty or partly written file that will use disk space only for the non-empty parts. It's commonly the case for p2p apps like torrents.
"ls -l" will give you the size of the file. Use "du" to know how much space is actually used on the disk (taking into account cluster uaage and sparse mode).
Or maybe your question is about the confusion where sometimes 1MB=1024*1024 bytes and sometimes 1MB=1000*1000 bytes