Shrinks videos files on hd

There are several powerful video conversion programs. However, the ones I know are all command line based, with rather strange and unintuitive parameters to make them do what you want. Essentially, you can choose between: transcode, ffmpeg, mencoder.

kino *does* have the option to reduce file size while preserving a decent video quality, using Export->Other and then for example "XviD MPEG-4 AVI" or "H.264 MP4". kino essentially calls ffmpeg with the right parameters.

Or did you mean scaling the image size?

In fact, taking a closer look, there are several apparently good video editing programs out there, in case kino is not what you are looking for:
kdenlive http://www.kdenlive.org/ (installable using the standard software manager)
cinelerra http://cinelerra.org/getting_cinelerra.php
pitivi http://www.pitivi.org/wiki/Main_Page (installable using the standard software manager)

Although I haven't really tried them, I guess they can also do video conversion. If not, try this, more simpler tool:
avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ (installable using the standard software manager)

Hi Cruncher
thanks for the detail. I've tested Kino and it does exactly what I want it to do.

Thanks for all the trouble.

Cheers