can't decode MULAW audio codec

[shun]

My Samsung D53 camera uses an audio codec called MULAW (CCITT u-Law) for movie clips, according to GSpot and VirtualDubMod. The problem is I can't play it in WMP11 nor decode it in VirtualDub. FFDShow has libavcodec support for "Mulaw/Alaw" format but it doesn't help WMP decode it and there's no sound when avi plays. Media Player Classic can play back the sound for some reason.

How do I go about enabling audio in WMP and allow VirtualDub to work with it?

[Placio74]

Look at this topic.
Try VirtualDub 1.7.3 Test1.

[shun]

That looked promising, but fortunately it didn't work for me. That version of VirtualDub still can't recognize it and crashes when trying to output a direct copy.

(That build does work on my computer with the sample video provided in that thread, but it doesn't work with the clips I have)

Well I've asked for help in that thread too. Hopefully someone can figure it out.

[jman98]

There's an old program called Vox that should be able to convert this format. You can find the source code at:
http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~tim/vox/
You will either need some familiarity in doing Unix type source code builds or you can see if there is a Windows version already built somewhere else that you can download. I don't know anything about your camera, but I can tell you that this sound format is really old and failrly poor quality.

[shun]

Mmm thanks, that looks complicated... ok I built it in cygwin but it doesn't work directly, might need to be transcoded.

On the other hand, while I was working with that I realized that other softwares could edit the audio file directly. So I used Adobe Audition and voila, it was recognized. Now it can be saved to other formats which is good... though I still wished VirtualDub could work with it directly.

[shun]

By the way, can anyone recommend some cheap compact digital cameras, preferably ones by Canon, that support modern video formats like MPEG4+mp3?