Black On Stuff

It’s a fact that the movies shot by Canon cameras do not play on most DVD with DivX capabilities due to codec incompatibility. This is of course a problem. Another problem is that the shot movies are hardly encoded so the size is quite big for the number of minutes. Here is my guide to convert these videos to XviD videos.

AVIcodec shows the information below:

- video: MJPG = Motion JPEG
- audio: PCM, mono

For conversion I’m using the tools below. I am listing also my version since some problems may occur with a different configuration (for instance I was using lame ACM mp3 codec version 3.98 alpha 11 and I was receiving some debugging information when trying to change/encode the audio)

- VirtualDUB 1.7.0
- Xvid video codec
- lame ACM MP3 codec

Open your file to transcode in VirtualDUB. Make sure Video -> Full Processing Mode is selected then go to Video -> Compression and select XviD MPEG-4 Codec. If you click on Configure you can select the encoding quality. Here are my settings:

The go to Audio and make sure Full Processing Mode is selected. Go to Audio -> Conversion and change from 8 bit to 16 bit in the Precision box. Then go to Audio -> Compression and select whatever quality you’d like for audio. Here are my settings:

You’re almost done. Now go to File -> Save as AVI and save your final file. You’ll just have to wait for the encoding to happen, but in the end the final file size will be less than 10x the original file.