Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> First: My video camera records to mini-DVDs. It has two recording modes: 
> "video" and "VR". I have several disks full of video, all recorded in VR 
> mode. My mum's DVD player can play them. My dad's DVD player can play 
> them. My grandparents' ancient DVD player can play them. But every 
> *computer* under the Sun solemly swears that the DVDs are completely 
> blank and there is no data to play.
> 
> In a fit of extreme desperation, I consulted the manual. Guess what? The 
> camera has to be plugged into the mains to enable the "finalise disk" 
> option. o_O I mean, yeah, I can see why they're do that, but talk about 
> non-obvious...!
> 
> Anyway, I finalised the disk, and suddenly my PC can read it. Yay!

Realising that the camera needs to be on mains power before it will 
finalise anything, I was actually able to finalise the VR-mode disks. (I 
had assumed it wouldn't let me finalise them because they're VR-mode, 
which is only allowed for rewritable disks and supposedly isn't 
compatible with DVD players.)

My PC can now read these disks too, although they show up with a 
different file structure, and Windoze doesn't offer to run the DVD 
player program. However, if you manually invoke the DVD software and 
hand it the video file, it plays it without difficulty.

> Now... how in the name of God do you *edit* the thing?! >_<

Apparently Virtual Dub doesn't like MPEG2, but there's a thing called 
"Virtual Dub Mod" which handles it. I downloaded and installed this last 
night, and sure enough it will open and play the video file.

However... the sound is encoded with something called "AC-3", which 
apparently isn't supported. So there's no sound. (Recall that the sound 
is the part I'm most interested in keeping.)

At first I was truly upset about this. But now it occurs to me: I'm only 
trying to *edit* the thing. Virtual Dub Mod can't *decode* the audio, 
but it may well still be able to *copy* it regardless. And since it 
*can* decode the video, I can still see what I'm editing. This might 
actually work...

The slightly clunky alternative is to just cut the physical file into 
pieces and see if it still plays. Various sources claim that the MPEG2 
container format is supposed to survive this, so we'll see... (But 
hopefully I won't need to try this.)

Assuming both of these fail, I guess I'll have to resort to the hated 
mencoder. :-(

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