A TechLore "Ask the Experts" Question...
Question
Dear Sir, please can you help. I Have a Canon digital camera which records and plays 30 seconds clips of video. These can be copied to a CD and played in a program called QuickTime on my computer, but it they will not play in my home DVD player. However, it does work when I copy JPEG photos. I have a Panasonic DVD home theater system, model SC-HT870. I'm hoping you can help this silly old fool in Devon.
-submitted by terry
Answer:
The reason why your DVD player will not play those discs is because the format in which the videos are captured by the camera are not compatible with the DVD player.
Video files are digitally encoded and compressed to save space. Since there are many different formats to do this, such as h.264, MJPG, MPG 1/2/3, WMV, XviD, DivX, and more; the only device that can usually play all of them is a computer.
Older and basic Canon digital cameras normally use the MJPG (Motion JPEG) format in an AVI container for their video files, which are not usually compatible with most home theater components. This is because the DVD player does not have the proper decoder to uncompress the file. It's like talking to someone in Japanese if they only speak French.
However, not all hope is lost. The AVI files can be reformatted into something that your DVD player can play. The SC-HT870 is compatible with both S-VCD and Video CD formats. This means that the DVD player is capable of playing back certain kinds of MPG files.
There are many tools available for your computer to convert one video file to another. If you use Windows, do a search for TMPGEnc on your preferred search engine. This is a free tool that allows you to convert AVI files to VCD style MPG files for both the US and European formats. Then using CD writing software like NERO, you can create a CD that your DVD player can understand. If you're not a fan of these programs, there are many other options you could try by hunting around. If you're a Mac user, iMovie should be able to do everything you need.
Have fun watching those video files!
Matt Whitlock - Editor, TechLore.com
