Can't playback a DV file from Mac on PC

[seehontung]

I'm trying to read/edit some vids off a ZR60 cam that my friend used to record our skiing adventures. He used iVideo to transfer from the camera to his Mac and then burnt me files on a DVD.

When I opened the DVD on my PC, I only see files with no file extensions or anything. Nothing seems to have worked to open the files (I've tried all the various DV codecs) and only another friend who had a mythtv box running mplayer could play the file. It appears to be a rawDV file but still nothing I've tried is able to open the file.

Any suggestions what is going on there? I posted also in another thread which may not be related:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=266011

thanks for any help anyone can give!

[ozymango]

Any suggestions what is going on there? I posted also in another thread which may not be related:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=266011

I thought that question looked familiar!

Well, for starters, did you ever play this disc back on the original mac to verify that it works there? I've burned a couple of discs in my time that looked fine in terms of just glancing at the files, but when I tried actually viewing the files they freaked and wouldn't play.

But assuming that's been checked -- are you trying to open the files from the DVD or have you copied them (or one to test at least) to your computer? Try copying the files to your PC, then keep renaming them with various extensions and seeing if anything will stick. For starters I'd try adding the extension ".avi" and then view them with GSpot and see if it can figure anything out. Didn't work for me but it's always worth a try.


You might also try renaming them with a ".dv" extension and see what happens. And one time I had a file that wouldn't open with any viewer but I could drag it into tmpgenc and it could somehow read the file. Then I exported it as an AVI file and probably lost all kinds of detail but I did manage to recover it.

Hang in there! We'll figure this out one way or another!

[seehontung]

Thanks for your reply! I swear video is one the most frustrating things to work with on the computer... but admittedly one of hte most rewarding when stuff actually works!

Tried each of your suggestions but no go. I think the files on DVD are ok since I have multiple DVDs burnt at different times (1 year span) and all of them suffer from the same problem.

I wonder if it's a special iVideo/Mac format for rawDV, even perhaps it gets lost in the Mac/PC translation...

[ozymango]

I wonder if it's a special iVideo/Mac format for rawDV, even perhaps it gets lost in the Mac/PC translation...

That's my theory as well but none of the Mac people I know will confirm this ... grrr ...

Well, in my case, the only thing that worked at all to even begin to recover, was opening the files on a Mac, and then exporting with Quicktime into something almost readable ... ...

Do you have any access to a Mac? Again, even when I used a Mac, only Quicktime would open it, iMovie even failed, and I never could figure out what codec Quicktime thought the file was using.

If you can't beg or borrow a Mac, it might be worth a trip to your local Kinkos to see if you can open these files on one of their Macs, using Quicktime; might cost a buck or two in test time but it may at least tell us what kind of codec we're working with. Or not.