Can't view avi from mac on PC

[imacryan]

Hi,
I just bought my first mac a few weeks ago, a 1 ghz imac, and I love it, but just ran into my first compatability problem. I own a canon s30 digital cam, and I shot some short 20 second or so videos with it, transfered them to the mac, and renamed them. Other than that, I didn't edit them at all. The videos had always played on a windows PC before, but now when I burn them to a CD from the mac (by putting in a black CD, dragging them to the CD, and clicking burn) and attempt to view them on a windows computer, the file opens, sound plays, but no picture. Anyone know what's wrong? Thanks in advance.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

What codec is the mac using to create the .avi files. There might be options that you need to set - Indeo Video works ok, if you see that option, use it.

D

 

[imacryan]

I figured it was a codec problem, but I have no idea how to change any of that. I may sound really dumb here, but I'll tell you what I know. I thought the format of the avi's is determined by the camera. Anyway, I don't know how to change any codec settings, so here is exactly what I did.

I took the compact flash card with the movies from the camera, put it in a USB CF card reader, and dragged the movie files to a folder, without altering anything (except for a rename). Then I transferred them to a CD. This is week number 2 for me as a mac user, so please tell me exactly what I need to do to be able to transfer the movies from a CF card to a mac, burn, and then have them work on a PC. I am terribly sorry for sounding slow...

 

[superfunkomatic]

if you have quicktime pro, you can save the movies as a "self-contained movie" which basically incorporates the resource files and movie together as one. that may fix the issue or if you've compressed it pick a compression algorithm that PC will likely support - Cinepak, Indeo, Sorenson, etc.
make sure you burn your cd's for the pc as ISO9660 a standard that runs on both.

 

[patrick0brien]

-imacryan

Sounds like a classic .avi reading problem on the Mac.

I'll bet dollar to doghtnuts that movie was compressed with the divx codec.

They tend to do exactly as you describe - even if they launch properly. I agree with superfunkomatic that you should find a better codec (one less proprietary).

OR!

Capture the movies on the Mac. Is this an option?

 

[imacryan]

This isn't a digital camcorder, it is a regular canon 3.2 mega pixel digital camera. It just has an option to record movies up to 30 seconds that really aren't that great quality, but can be fun sometimes. I don't know what the mac is doing to these files, as all I am doing to them is directly copying them from a compact flash card to a folder, then burning it to CD.


They play fine on the mac using quicktime. The only time they won't play is if they are copied from the mac to CD, then the CD played on a PC. It is on the PC that I get the problem of sound but no video. Every other file I create with the mac and burned to a CD has worked fine on a PC, eg jpg, pdf, doc's.

If I go right from camera to PC they also play fine. This is an extremely common digital camera, so I think the format should be pretty standard. How do I burn in ISO9660? I don't have Toast, I am just using the built-in CD burning capabilities of the mac, without changing any settings. I don't even know how to change any settings. Thanks again.

 

[patrick0brien]

Oh. Duh. I R thmart.

Read it backward.

As for ISO. I believe the native burner is ISO9660.

Have you tried to create and burn .mov files on the Mac instead of .avi's?

That should work as you ask.

 

[superfunkomatic]

if you have quicktime pro you can export the file again as a quicktime movie ".mov" or you could try opening it in the free imovie software, not sure if it supports avi files.
my gun is empty, no more hints. there used to be a file converter called avi to mov or "moov" something like that on download.com. it may be helpful.

good luck.