[iamraymond]

So I was playing with a friends HDD HD Camcorder, and I tried to connect it to my mac. He said he's always had problems with people with macs because they don't play the sound. His camcorder saves all files as MPGs. Low and behold when I connect it to my Macbook Pro, no sound played! I dragged the file into XP through Parallels and it played with the sound. Is this a common issue with macs and mpgs?

I tried playing on VLC, QT, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. On Final cut pro, it did not even detect a sound track on the mpg files.

This did not only happen to the files that came from his HDD HD Camcorder, but also with files I got from a friends Mini DV cam which he transferred to me via external hard drive.

Can anyone help me out?

TIA

[Thorzdad]

What brand of camcorder is it?

[iamraymond]

Sony

[Thorzdad]

Well, it all comes down to formatting and compatibility, of course. Macs and mpegs have always gotten along just fine. Macs and Sony products, on the other hand, have had a love/hate relationship over the years, especially when it comes to all things audio.

I see that the top-of-the-line Sony HDD camcorder records video in mpeg2 and the audio in 5.1 Dolby surround. I'm betting that the Dolby encoding is causing the problem. I know QuickTime and OSX can handle Dolby surround from certain source files, but I'm not sure how it might handle the Sony files.

You might want to try posting this in the Consumer Hardware & Components forum or the OSX forum.

[iamraymond]

Okay. I figured it out by searching forums all day.

I downloaded a free program called MPEG Streamclip. It plays and converts MPEG files with sound! It sucks though cause if I want to edit the files I need to encode all the files to .mov files first (an extra step to an already long process).

It'd be nice if I could just get the demuxing ability of Streamclip built right into Final Cut Pro (the program I edit with). Oh well. This will have to do

Unless there are any other suggestions??