Transcoding Video
January 16th, 2004
I’m frustrated at trying to make use of my stupid camera. On the one hand, it is way cool to have a camera that is effectively a real-time MPEG-2 encoder. On the other hand, working with the Mac is getting frustrating. I need to find an easier way to go from MPEG-2 videos that my camera produces to DV formats that iMovie or iDVD will work with.
Update: I have a real, worthwhile solution. I use MPEG2 Works. Read about it in my other article.
Here’s what I think is true
- Most Apple packages (QuickTime itself, iDVD, iMovie) rely on Quicktime to do video and audio transcoding. (translating from one format to another).
- You must transcode from your MPEG files to some other variation on MPEG to make a DVD.
- Even if you buy Quicktime Pro and the Quicktime MPEG-2 playback component (which I have done), you still cannot transcode the audio. That is, when you try to convert from your MPEG file with audio to some other format, you will lose your audio. There’s NOTHING you can do about this as far as I can tell. Apple’s QuickTime FAQ is pretty definitive on this.
I thought perhaps Final Cut express would answer my problems, but this post over at computing.net tells me it doesn’t. Thanks for saving me $299.
My solution
- I take my MPEG files and use a Windows program (under VirtualPC) to convert them to AVI files.
- The Windows program (Ulead DVD Studio or some such thing) preserves the audio when converting to AVI, but it is dog-slow doing this in Virtual PC.
- Then I can drag the AVI file into iMovie or iDVD and it will get converted and the audio is preserved.
This sucks because it takes so long, but it works.
What format is the audio? (E.g. AC3, MP3, PCM, etc.?) Perhaps more useful would be the make and model of the camera. Also, I assume the file output from the camera is some sort of progressive stream, like a .vob or .avi? Or does it give you the elementary streams (a .m2v for the video and, say, a .ac3 for the audio)?
Glad to see you using OS X. Nice, ain’t it?
The camera is a Hitach DMZ-230a. The file format is the VR_MOVIE.VRO file that you can find referenced on the web (if you just google on that name).
I don’t know much about it, but I know these things:
1. There are multiple MPEG movies in there. At least the crappy Winderz programs that came with the camera can figure out where scenes start and stop.
2. When the Winderz software breaks it out into a bunch of files, one per scene, it creates a bunch of MPEG-2 files. The audio is muxed MPEG-2 audio. Which, as we all know, Quicktime will play but will not manipulate.
I just found http://www.gemini3.co.yu/tosa/mpeg2works/ this software and I’m going to give it a shot. they claim to be able to do this sort of conversion.
Yeah, MPEG2Works is probably your best bet, it’s the only Mac program I know of that claims to be able to work with MPEG-2 audio. Because MPEG-2 audio is rather uncommon (DVD’s and DTV, the only common mediums I can think of that use MPEG-2 video, usually use AC-3 audio) I’m even having trouble finding Linux-aimed tools to work with it. Let me know what solution you find, I’m curious to hear it.