MJPG AVI to MPG - Totally Confused - Please Help

[4LilPrinces]

Hello,

This may not be the place to ask, but I've been all over the internet and so far the information here is the best I've found.... Still, I can't manage to figure this out on my own - hoping some kind soul will take pity on me!

I have an .AVI movie taken with a Canon Powershot A40. It plays just fine from my HD with QuickTime 5.0.2, but when I try to play it with Windows Media Player or add it to a web page (launching either Quick Time or WMP), all I get is sound, no picture.

I understand this has something to do with an MJPG codec, and while I've downloaded & installed what I thought was the right one (Morgan MulitiMedia M-JPEG 2000 codec), I still can't get it to play in WMP.

My ultimate goal is to convert it to a more friendly file format (plain-vanilla MPEG?) so I can upload it to a web page for family to see.

I've also downloaded TMPGEnc (V 2.56), but it cannot open the video portion of the file, only audio.

Obviously, I'm missing something really important here, and doing this all wrong. Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance,
LLJ

[D_Knife]

have you tried virtualdub - I seem to remember that on the open window there are some sub options that allows virtualdub to use it's internal MJPEG decoding engine in favour of a hardware codec - since you don't seem to have a MJPEG codec this might just work.

On the other hand as an Canon Powershot A30 owner (no sound recording) - why would you bother with poor quality low resolution video when the camera produces stunning beautiful stills?

[4LilPrinces]

Thanks for the advice - I'll download virtualdub and see how that works out. I did have a measure of success using AVIedit, but the quality was awful. (I saved the file as AVI with that program, then used TMPGEnc to convert it to MPEG.) It worked, but the resulting MPEG was really washed out, overexposed looking. I fiddled with the settings but can't get it to come close to the vivid colors of the original. Back to square one, I guess.

And yes, the PowerShot takes amazing stills - I still am in awe of what a great job it does for such a (relatively) inexpensive camera. It's my third digital, and I finally found the one that will keep me happy for a long time. I don't usually use it for video, but when I saw my 4 year old dancing at the 4th of July parade, it was too cute to pass up. The camera does a pretty good job for short (<10 second) clips, and is really handy when it's just not worth dragging out the video camera.

Thanks again,
LLJ

[D_Knife]

Yeah - I suppose

I wish the camera didn't have a 10 second limit on the video though. I have a 64MB CF and it says I can record 159seconds of footage - provided I do it in 10 second chunks.
I'm saving for a Canon D60