What can I do with an AVI file?

[albi123]

Hello,

I have a POwershot SD450 Digital Camera - it takes avi files in movie mode. I'm kind of familiar with mpeg, vcd and svcd but I dont' know what is an avi and what can I do with it and what is the best thing to do with it? COnvert it? or just join and split- seems like AVIs are big files. Usually I'll do svcd because don't have a dvd burner. And if I have to edit it, what would be the best software? Thx a lot

[redwudz]

You could try Windows Movie Maker for starts. It's probably a .mov/Quicktime file.

Or just to convert it to SVCD you could use TMPGEnc encoder with a TMPGEnc Mov Plugin.

[daamon]

Hi albi123,

Welcome to the forums.

"AVI" stands for "Audio and Video Interleaved" - and is exactly that: a file which contains audio and video which are interleaved, or combined.

Think of AVI as a container - it can hold audio and video, both of which have been encoded with different types of codecs (or maybe none, meaning it's uncompressed).

Common video codecs are DV, Divx, Xvid (among others) and common audio codecs are WAV (uncompressed), MP3 and AC3 again, among others.

A quick search on Google reveals it shoots video at 30 fps at 640 x 480, with the resultant AVI being: "Image: Motion JPEG; Audio: WAVE (Monaural)".

If you're happy with SVCDs, then stick with those - especially if you're shooting at a resolution of 640 x 480.

For basic edits - cuts and joins - maybe VirtualDub will do the trick. Be sure to set it to Video -> Direct Stream Copy otherwise it will default to uncompressed AVI and you'll get a huge file.

[celtic_druid]

Probably the avi uses MJPEG for video and PCM for audio. You could frameserve using AVISynth with trim() commands to your SVCD encoder.

[Bjs]

What not create a minidvd ... dvd on cd .

Dvddecryptor can burn these ... just use folder2iso to generate the iso from the authored dvd folder first , then use dvddecryptor to burn it to cd .

[daamon]

Why not create a minidvd ... dvd on cd.

Not all DVD players accept these, and you're limited to about 20 minutes of footage at full D1 resolution. This would give a bitrate of around 4,800.

But, if both of those aren't a problem, then give it a go. Try a resolution of half-D1, this should allow the bitrate to roughly halve, and so approximately doubling the running time you can fit on.

This all assumes a bitrate of 224 for the audio, meaning either MP2 (only for PAL) or AC3 (PAL and NTSC).

[yoda313]

meaning either MP2 (only for PAL)

Nope. A vast majority of ntsc players will take MP2 audio. The hauppauge mpeg cards like the wintv pvr250 only record in mp2 and I never had a problem on ntsc players with a mp2 only audio track.

Now to be 100% ntsc compatible you should have at least a pcm or ac3 track on it as well but for the MOST part you shouldn't have a problem with mp2 only.

[daamon]

@ yoda313: True, my "MP2 only for PAL" comment was misleading. That said, MP2 isn't officially in the NTSC specification for DVD audio, and so players aren't obliged to support it. However, as you rightly point out, most do.

If I were in NTSC-land, I wouldn't use MP2 - just in case someone's player doesn't support it. But then I do wedding videos for friends and family, and am looking into turning it into a paying hobby, so I can't afford to take the risk.

But thanks for clarifying my comment.

[edDV]

Canon's ususally use MJPEG codecs. Windows movie maker can view and edit them. So can virtualdub with picvideo MJPEG codec.

https://www.videohelp.com/tools?toolsearch=MJPEG&Submit=Search&s=&orderby=Name&hits=50&...res=&listuser=

[celtic_druid]

Last time I checked VirtualDub had a built in MJPEG decoder. You shouldn't need to install anything.

[edDV]

Correct. I ljust loaded a Canon S-60 MJPEG movie into virtualdub and windows movie maker and it played and could be edited in both.