MPEG4 Digital Camcorders in Mac OS X ??

[tiselday]

Hi all,

I am thinking about buying a Mustek DV 4000 MPEG4 digital videocam/camera - review - (http://www.i4u.com/article514.html) just to because it is so cheap and tiny that I can carry it around without thinking too much about it and film some salsa turns while in the salsa courses - hei, any mac AND salsa fan out there? :) I understand that the quality of the movies is so-so, but that's ok in this case.

But then, those gadgets just produce ASF files, which are not compatible with iMovie. A friend of mine has that same device and he forwarded me some of his ASF movies, and, for the moment I have not been able to view them with anything else than VLC on my powerbook. ffmpeg or mplayer were not able to understand the format, either.

So I am out of ideas, here. Anyone looking at the MPEG4 memory-based cams from a Mac point of view ??

Regards,
T

[BrianKonarsMac]

Hi all,

I am thinking about buying a Mustek DV 4000 MPEG4 digital videocam/camera - review - (http://www.i4u.com/article514.html) just to because it is so cheap and tiny that I can carry it around without thinking too much about it and film some salsa turns while in the salsa courses - hei, any mac AND salsa fan out there? :) I understand that the quality of the movies is so-so, but that's ok in this case.

But then, those gadgets just produce ASF files, which are not compatible with iMovie. A friend of mine has that same device and he forwarded me some of his ASF movies, and, for the moment I have not been able to view them with anything else than VLC on my powerbook. ffmpeg or mplayer were not able to understand the format, either.

So I am out of ideas, here. Anyone looking at the MPEG4 memory-based cams from a Mac point of view ??

Regards,
T
ASF is a windows media file...mpeg 4 is open source...why not buy a DV camera and compress your video into mpeg4? then you'd have both an uncompressed copy for show, and a compressed copy for transfer (email etc). plus mini dv cams are quite tiny as it is, so small in fact i find the buttons can be hard to press with my fat fingers!

[tiselday]

ASF is a windows media file...mpeg 4 is open source...why not buy a DV camera and compress your video into mpeg4? then you'd have both an uncompressed copy for show, and a compressed copy for transfer (email etc). plus mini dv cams are quite tiny as it is, so small in fact i find the buttons can be hard to press with my fat fingers!

yes, I understand that ASF is a windows file format, encapsulating a MPEG4 video stream.

But although the mini dv cams are smallish, they cannot compare to this gadget: it is around 100 gr, slightly bigger than my T68i mobile phone! It is so small that it looks like a toy, and thus much less imposing to the people you are actually filming. Not to mention that it s also a fourth of the price of a mini dv cam. All in all, just perfect for the use I want to give it...

So it's a shame that it only outputs ASF video files: the information is there, the codec MPEG4 is something that iMovie understands, i just have to get rid of the pesky ASF wrapping!! ;)

[gekko513]

something like this (http://www.canon-europe.com/Support/Patches/MPEG4_ASF/index.asp?ComponentID=146683&SourcePageID=26346)?

[tiselday]

something like this (http://www.canon-europe.com/Support/Patches/MPEG4_ASF/index.asp?ComponentID=146683&SourcePageID=26346)?

almost like that, yes. But I guess that this is only useful for those particular D75 memory cards, an ASF container with specific Canon codecs (G.726 audio codec, for instance).

Nevertheless, I am having some success with VLC now. I manage to open the ASF files and dump them encapsulated as MP4, something that QuickTime understands (but not iMovie)...

takk, i alle fall ;)
T