Well, the NVousPC Mercury Laptop review should be popping up within the next 24 to 48 hours. For the video supplement I used a Sanyo Xacti which takes MPEG-4 video as well as 5.1MP pics. When I transferred all the video over Windows Movie Maker wouldn’t import it as it was an unsupported format. I then tried to play it with VLC, but VLC had a weird error where it would only play the top left quadrant of the video. VLC has never failed me in the past, but this MPEG-4 threw it for a loop. I then downloaded and installed Quicktime and that played it fine.

I moved on to Super, which in my opinion is the best free video encoder you can find anywhere. It does more than a lot of the “pay for” programs can do. Unfortunately, Super couldn’t seem to convert it successfully to any format that I wanted MPEG-II, AVI, or WMV. I then searched and found a program called MP4Cam2AVI, which if you couldn’t tell by the name, converts MPEG-4 to AVI. Getting the raw footage converted and then edited took much longer than it should have. I can’t really blame Movie Maker because it is a free service and works great for capturing video off of a normal tape camera.

I guess my biggest complaint is that we have all these different video formats, but very few of them seem to play nice with each other. Also, to get a video editing program to accept a good portion of them would cost a few hundred dollars for the license.

The bottom line: if you are going to make a camera or new video format that is suppose to play nice with Windows, then you have to get it integrated into Movie Maker so people don’t need a multi-hundred dollar piece of software or download an extra program to convert it just to make a basic YouTube video.

</rant>

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Consumer Electronics, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.