Converting/using Canon EOS video files?

[rogerg]

G'day all,

While on our recent honeymoon we took some video on my wife's Canon 500D. Neither of us are particularly fluent with video so we're having some troubles using the video's.

Double clicking the files on the PC they will play in MS Media Player. But none of the canon softare or the software I have for my Cowon Q5W to convert video to it's suitable formats seems able to handle the canon files. The Cowon video converter software just can't process them (gets an error and says it's unable to). Canon's ZoomEX says they're an invalid picture format.

I can't find any canon software which came with the camera to be able to process the video in any way - change it's format, size, etc. Am I blind?

Any recommendations on what software to use to work with these canon video files? Primarily to convert them to 720x for porting to my Q5W.

Thanks,
Roger.

[citivolus]

VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) is my suggestion. You will need to have the proper codecs installed, but if you can already view the video then you do. Do you know what encoding format the Q5W uses?

[rogerg]

Sorry, not sure. I have little understanding of video encoding. I'll probably be able to find out at home tonight, there's bound to be tech spec info for it there, and the video converter software might say.

I thought I'd be able to tell right now by looking at the properties of the AVI files on it, but it doesn't say codec, only bit rate and resolution. I know it supports file formats DivX, XVID, WMV, MPEG, but I think that's largely irrelevant, it's what codec they're encoded as which matters?

I will give virtualdub a try at home, thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks,
Roger.

[citivolus]

Ah, had a quick look at the spec. Just use DivX as your codec, at 720x480. To do this, start VirtualDub, open your video file, set audio to "direct stream copy". Set video to "normal recompress" or "fast recompress". Set video compression to DivX, with the "Home Theater" profile selected. Then select "File", "Save as AVI". This should hopefully cover it :)

[rogerg]

Thanks, will give it a shot :)