[WSE]

I just purchased a Samsung SC-X205L sports camcorder which claims to be Mac compatible. Be wary.

After some effort and a non-intuitive interface, I was able to download the video files I made to my MacBookPro. They appear as AVI files and when I open them from within either Quicktime Pro or VLC, I hear audio but the video is all white. In Quicktime, command-I gives this information:

Format: DIVX 6.0, 720 x 480, Millions
DVI ADPCM, Stereo, 22.050 kHz
FPS: 29.97

After reading some prior posts about AVI problems, I went to www.divx.com and downloaded the free drivers and installed them, restarted Quicktime and no difference. Someone else suggested trying to play the videos within a web browser, but it was still white (no) video and good audio.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated. My son wants to eventually import these files into iMovie and edit them, but we can't even see them!! On the camera playback, we can see that they are real movies.

[mduell]

Try playing them in VLC.

As for editing them, good luck. In my experience, OSX apps (and Apple's in particular) aren't very flexible; anything that's slightly malformed or an unexpected format just won't work. I've got a bunch of MPEG2s ripped from DVDs that QuickTime won't play (VLC does just fine) and ffmpegx won't reencode (AutoGK does just fine) presumably because the headers aren't what they're expecting.
That said, ffmpegx may be able to convert them to MPEG2, which iMovie should read, and is of course the native format for DVDs.

[WSE]

VLC 0.8.6 (just downloaded from their website) tried to open the AVI files but gave this error message:

main: no suitable decoder module for fourcc 'SEDG'
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format

It did play audio.

Any help really appreciated. I also tried mplayer; Divx's playback application; DivX Doctor, and Mac VCD .. most of which played the audio only.

When I play from within the camcorder, I see video. THey must use some proprietary format. The manual ignores Macs and there is a CD with a video codec on it.

[mduell]

Can you take a short clip (like 5-8MB) and post it on the web or email it to me?

[Jacke]

Try changing the fourCC to DIVX or XVID.

[WSE]

Thanks to all for your suggestions. I called Samsung customer service first thing this morning .. guess what! -- they use a proprietary version of DIVX video codec and have not developed one for the Mac yet. They apologized for labeling their product as Mac compatible (there are many references in the manual to OS 10, instructions on how to transfer files, etc) and said they would issue me a full refund.

Of course, that's alot of work for me; I also have to go back to Circuit City and get them to refund my extended warranty, and return the extra memory I purchased there. More importantly, this was a gift for my son who now will be very disappointed that he can't use this product.

If anyone wants to try to get this to work on their own, I'd be happy to email you a short clip. Just send me your email address to jubilee108-at-gmail-dot-com. (I deconstructed the email address so it would be less likely to be auto harvested by spammers).

Finally, if any of you are familiar with Windows video manipulation, is there an easy process I could use once I get back from vacation to borrow someone's PC and batch convert the video files into an iMovie compatible format before returning the camcorder?

Bill

[WSE]

Miracle! -- a Mac developer has published a little utility to do what Samsung could not figure out...

deSEDG - convert SEDG files back to DivX on OS X

Specifically addresses the problem with this particular video camera. I chanced upon it on Amazon's product page for this camcorder, where I was about to leave comments that it is not Mac compatible.

Once converted using Jesse's utility, the file plays in Quicktime and can be imported (albiet via a somewhat lengthy video conversion process) into iMovie and edited there. Definitely not as easy as straight DV format coming off a camcorder, but at least the video footage can be used.

[Uncle Skeleton]

So it looks like Jacke was right and all you have to do is change the FourCC to DIVX. (I mention this for posterity, in case someone finds this thread in the future and the above utility is gone or moved)

FYI, if you are only planning on cut/paste style edits (no video effects or titles etc), QTPro is a great value and does all editing very quick (no conversions or "rendering"), and the results are compatible with iDVD.

[red rocket]

I just stumbled across this website today:

Media Convert

It successfully converted some unplayable WMV3 files into MPG1 files, and it also converted a QuickTime trailer that was encoded in h.264, and therefore unplayable on my QT6/G3 setup, into MPG1 that played just fine.

3GP (in/out) AMV (out) ASF (in) AVI (in/out) DV (in) FLI (in) FLV (in) GVI (in) MKV (in) MOV (in/out) MP4 (in/out) MP4 (out) MP4 (out) MPG (in/out) OGM (in) SWF (out) VOB (in) WMV (in)

Movie conversion to AVI (DivX MPEG4), 3GP, SWF (Flash), AMV (for Chinese MP4/S1 MP3 players), MPEG2, MOV, MP4 (IPOD and PSP), MP3 (sound track extraction) and JPEG (frame extraction).
Options : resize, fps, codec, bitrate, fourcc, etc. (depends on the format)

Does quite a few other file conversions, as well.