Playing DV Handicam AVI video files on my WD HDTV Live

Hi All,

Could anyome tell me what I have to do to get my DV AVI  holiday videos shot on a Sony DV Handicam (not HD) to play on my HDTV Live. I get an error message that tells me that these AVI files are not supported. This is very disappointing since I bought the unit after reading that AVI files are supported! Do these files have to be re encoded for them to be recognised?

Thankyou,

Toolman

toolman wrote:

Hi All,

Could anyome tell me what I have to do to get my DV AVI  holiday videos shot on a Sony DV Handicam (not HD) to play on my HDTV Live. I get an error message that tells me that these AVI files are not supported. This is very disappointing since I bought the unit after reading that AVI files are supported! Do these files have to be re encoded for them to be recognised?

Thankyou,

Toolman

In short, they are not supported and yes you will have to re-encode them. The WDTV does support .avi files but it is a container and can contain many different types of actual codecs.

Hi ‘richUK’,

Thankyou for your reply to my question. Could you please suggest a suitable video encoding program, either shareware or to buy outright, that will successfully encode DV handicam AVI files (not HD) to enable them to play on WD HDTV Live.

Thanks,

Toolman

(Melbourne, Australia)

First of all, as Rich mentions the AVI file type is a container.  You need to determine what exactly is in that container in order to determine how best to reencode it.

If you want to compress it at the same time  (while still maintaining excellent quality) you could use the freeware Handbrake.  Just feed it the AVI file and choose the High Preset and MKV as the output container and it will do the rest automagically.

If you don’t want to compress it then the freeware ffmpeg will do the trick.  However, in that case you need to know what video and audio streams you want to change.  For example, if the video is okay (say, H264 or MPEG) then you can leave it alone.  If the audio is AC3 you can leave it alone.  You can use ffmpeg alone to find out what you have (syntax would be ffmpeg -i camerafile.avi and then it will show you).  After that let us know and I’ll give you the right syntax for changing it to a Live format.

Thankyou for your reply Mike, I will try your suggestions and let you know how I got on. Cheers, Leigh (Toolman)