Technical assistance, please
Andrik and Beanie know I'm not very technically minded (the dent on the side of my computer in college can attest to that as well) but I'm hoping the larger community here can help me with a techie question.
Does anyone know of a good (free) application I can use to convert .MOV files to something a little friendlier (.avi, .wmv, .mpg)? My new digital camera only saves movies as .MOV, and they're big chunky files that can only be played by my arch-nemesis, QuickTime Viewer.
I had a really great conversion program (Stoik Video Converter) that I used on my old camera, but it won't do .mov-to-.mpg conversions. Freeware recommendations are appreciated.
Sorry for the tech-speak and I promise I'll be back with witty insight again soon. I have Italy pictures I need to post for everyone.
posted by Jamie @ 11:43 AM
10 comments
10 Comments:
Well, I've looked for a .mov converter online for you. I can't find one that is completely free there are a ton that have a free trial. The price ranges are about $19.99 - $29.99 (roughly). I don't know if any of them have that thing where you just click past the payment solicitation and can still use the software.
If QuickTime is your only qualm, you should be able to play the videos on Windows Media player or any number of other multimedia players. Just because they don't open there when you double-click them doesn't mean they can be read by other software.
If file size is also a big issue for you, then you might have to investigate getting already-paid-for software from someone, hacking a company's software, or just downloading a free trial and never paying for it.
Okay, so I just tried to play a .mov file in Media Player and it didn't work. There's one less option for you. Sorry.
Yeah i'm pretty sure .mov files can only be played by QuickTime, as it's Apple's proprietary format.
What's wrong with .mov, anyway? I don't recall ever having trouble with the windows quicktime player.
Are you sure your camera doesn't have a setting to change the format? Or, if you're that worried about file size, maybe you can have it record movies at a lower resolution?
What kind of camera did you get?
How did you decide on it? I'm getting a new camera, and am in the comparison process.
If you don't like QuickTime, you might be able to just get a different kind of player. The only ones I could find were not free (too bad). But there might be others.
Well, there wasn't much of a decision process for my new camera - the old one got stolen last month when I was in Ireland, and my parents gave me their old/new camera as a birthday gift. It's only about four months old, so it's not really an "old" camera.
It's a Konica-Minolta dImage something or another. It takes fantastic pictures (which you'll see if I ever get off my butt and post Italy photos)... my only complaint is that it takes movies as .MOV files.
I've checked the manual and there doesn't appear to be any way to switch the recording format. My biggest complaint is not necessarily with .MOV or QuickTime (although I'm not a QT fan)... it's that I can't find a free compression program for .MOV files, so I'm stuck with these 90MB videos that could easily be compressed to a third that size.
I'm thinking I may need to cough up $25 for a mov2avi or mov2wmv program. Aaargh.
But really, why does it matter if they're 90 MB vs. 30? Unless you're emailing them to people...
You can get a 250 GB hard drive for under 100 bucks these days, and I bet you'd get better use out of that than a movie conversion program.
You could try Xmpeg - not sure how it handles Mov files though.
If you want to e-mail them to somebody - I'd try using Youtube.com or video.google.com
They both have a 100mb file limit, but they will automatically convert your video to their proprietary (web-friendly) format. That way you can either just e-mail somebody the link to the video or embed it into your webpage. Check out my most recent entry for an example of an embedded video that I uploded to Youtube.
Not sure why the audio isn't synced in that one - I've been meaning to e-mail them about it.
scratch that XMpeg comment... looks like it only converts DVD files. D'OH!
It's funny you should bring up YouTube... this whole compression issue actually came up because I wanted to post my videos to YouTube. A few of my videos are 103MB, 107MB, etc., and I wanted to compress them down to size. Even the ones under the file size are pretty large, and they were taking forever to upload.
I still can't believe this camera would only take .MOV files, although I can't find anything to indicate otherwise. Is Konica-Minolta in bed with Apple or something?
You could try Google Video - which supposedly has no file limit. Can you edit them from within the camera and cut out a few seconds to get below the 100mb file size?
Most digital cameras use specific movie codec that can-not be changed. The only thing you can change (most of the time) is resolution and framerate.
I posted the beginning of my Google vs YouTube comparison just now - keep an eye open for updates.
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