Quicktime

[Mirrorball]

Do macs convert dv to avi or do you need to download a converter? Can you do it in Quicktime?

[Lucylastic]

Do macs convert dv to avi or do you need to download a converter? Can you do it in Quicktime?

Quicktime Pro (not the bundled Quicktime Player) will do it, but not necessarily with the best quality or the most options.

[boingo]

Is DV the same as DivX? Some info says it's a digital video camera format, while others say it's DivX. Perhaps it's both.

An AVI movie is a string of JPEG photos shown one after the other, it's close to analogue. Because of this AVI files are also one of the largest file types.
While I haven't tried converting DV files, for other file types I find DVD compatible MPEG has the highest quality to file size ratio for other formats.

Unfortunately I don't have any DV format videos or I'd see if any of the free converters work. I've sent an email to a friend who works in IT, so he may have some ideas.

[PlasticAnnArbor]

an avi is just a container for the video and sound and can be one of many formats .I use mencoder with mplayer
it works on linux, mac, and windows , and i think there is a solaris port

[boingo]

I've done some more hunting and found what appears to be the ultimate free video format converter called "MPEG Streamclip", but Squared 5!

There's Mac and PC versions
http://www.squared5.com/

It seems safe enough from the reviews on Stumble Upon:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.squared5.com/


From the Squared 5 site:
"MPEG Streamclip is a powerful high-quality video converter, player, editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod. And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine, and even a stream and YouTube downloader.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, ... "


I'll have to download the PC version and give it a go too!

[Topic Of Gossip]

Yes, Boingo you've stumbled across an industry secret... MPEG Streamclip!

I've been using it at work for about 3 years now and it is excellent for video conversion. Especially as it allows you to use all the Apple Final Cut Pro codecs so you can say convert compressed video formats like MPEG-4 to DV PAL (UK video standard) with great results. Works best on a Mac though due to its linkage to Apple QuickTime.

To get the most out of MPEG Streamclip and video encoding/transcoding in general on a Mac I would also advise downloading Perian which will add encoding options for formats like Flash Video (FLV) etc...

http://perian.org/

And after you've downloaded that also try out FFmpegX which is the nice GUI front-end for the great FFmpeg video encoder...

http://www.ffmpegx.com/

I tend to flip between FFmpegX and MPEG Streamclip depending on the type of conversion I need to do. The ace in the hole for FFmpegX though is that it has the ability to convert RealPlayer Media files i.e. .rm into other formats if set up correctly.

And the best thing about all of these things is that they are... FREE!

[Mirrorball]

I've done some more hunting and found what appears to be the ultimate free video format converter called "MPEG Streamclip", but Squared 5!

There's Mac and PC versions
http://www.squared5.com/

It seems safe enough from the reviews on Stumble Upon:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.squared5.com/


From the Squared 5 site:
"MPEG Streamclip is a powerful high-quality video converter, player, editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod. And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine, and even a stream and YouTube downloader.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, ... "


I'll have to download the PC version and give it a go too!

Thanks it's converted it and the quality is fine, but there is no sound.