I recently purchased a Polaroid digital camcorder with a supplemental 1 gig SD card. I shot some video with it and then transfered it to my Mac. What I got is 8 or 9 .avi files. I then tried to use ffmpegx to convert them over to a format that would allow me to burn the files onto my LaCie DVD burner. I read in a different thread that you need to convert them to DVD, MPEG-2. But everytime I try it, it errors out on the audio portion of it. It doesn't seem to be recognizing the audio from the original .avi file or something. So as a result, I have not been successful in converting them. I'm wondering if there is some setting in ffmpegx that needs to be tweaked in order to have it work successfully. Please help!
Sadly, the manual doesn't give ANY indication of the codecs. However, when I drop the .AVI file into ffmpegX, this is what it says about the file:
Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 320x240, 30.00fps
Audio: mp2, 44100 Hz, mono, 64 kb/s
The format I select to convert it into is DVD mpeg2enc. Here's what it says it converts into:
Video: mpeg2enc mpeg2, 720x480, 4000 kbps, 29.97 fps, no crop
Audio: AC3, 48000 Hz, 448 kbps, normalize
After I click "encode," it starts it's thing. After awhile, it'll error out and say "Failed." When I open up the details of the attempted conversion, it says: **ERROR: [mplex] Unable to read from /Users/xxxxx/Desktop/Video/PICT0005.AVI.ff.AC3.
Any ideas?
This type of AVI file from digital cam using digital media are mostly MPEG4 with extensions like .mov, .mod. I uses WinDVD Creator 2 to open , edit , compile & convert to MPEG2 & then burn to DVD.
One thumb of rule: never burn any video direct to DVD from the timeline. Always convert to MPEG2 first & burn later unless you keep DVD coasters as a hobby.
Those AVI downloaded from the Internet can slao be converted using the same program except for DivX files - you need to have the DivXcodec in order to open as a video file. Otherwise the program will treat it as an audio file.
Actually, I think I've got it figured out. I first tried converting the .AVI file to .mov, which worked perfectly. Then I tried converting it to DVD and that worked too. I then moved the file over to Toast and tried burning it and that worked as well! Now, unfortunately the quality is a bit degraded since I had to convert it twice, but at least it's working. Thanks!
