I got a new toy for Christmas. It’s a Samsung SC-D353 Digital Video camera. It has a 1gb 40x memory stick, takes Mini-DV tapes, and has S-video, DV, and USB outs. So, I shot a few seconds of video, plugged the USB cable into the trusty powerbook, and… nothing.
Not even an error sound.
Odd… The powerbook can do *anything*. (can’t it?) hmm….
Ok, the first thing that I noticed was the camera was set to use USB 2. I changed the USB setting to use 1.1 with the camera’s setup menu, and now I can mount the memory stick as USB storage. COOL!!!! (told ya they can do anything…) There’s my .avi files, ready to view. Copied them down to the desktop, and double clicked on one. OK, now we have sound, but no video. Just white screen.
After some research, I found that Samsung wrote their own AVI codecs. (SMP4) You can download it here:
http://www.samsung.com/download/
Ok, but if we want to send this video to someone, (grandma), she’s not going to be able to grep google for the proper codecs, now will she?
So, we need to convert this video to something other than Samsung’s best guess at encoding. How about WMV? Most newbie users can see those without too much trouble, right?
Back to grepping google, I found a freeware video conversion utility for windows called VideoPak.
You can dowload a copy here:
http://www.tucows.com/preview/340342
This utility will allow the conversion of Samsung’s AVI format to everyday, normal WMV.
You can also specify the intended target for distribution, (broadband web video, email, streaming, etc)
I ran VideoPak on a 6mb AVI, and compressed it to 768k video for broadband, and it came out as a 1.9mb WMV.