HD video... more aggro than it's worth?

[gshaw]

We bought some Flip Mino HD camcorders for students to use based on their ease of use and went for the HD version as the price was good and quality should in theory be better.

 

Problem is you then end up in the nightmare that are video codecs

 

The Mino HD cameras record in mp4 format rather than standard AVI so now I'm unsure whether the output will play in say Moodle without conversion. Also editing in Windows Movie Maker may be out, from Google search seems to be black magic relating to what codec may \ may not be installed at the time.

 

So I'm wondering whether it's more problem than it's worth and to stick to basic video in future and have to live with converting the HD vids back to standard AVIs for now?

[mac_shinobi]

what video formats do play in moodle ?

[richardp]

Hi we have a couple of the standard def versions of the flip vid cams and I can tell you that they have the same problem with codecs. What seems to solve the problem usually is to make sure that you plugin the camera to the PC or Mac you will be using to edit the video on and let the builtin software run. This will install the codec that they use to encode the video and you should then be able to use other editing software such as moviemaker or premiere etc... to edit or convert the video.

 

As a matter of course I would normally convert them to flash video anyway if they are to be posted to a vle or website etc... as this pretty much ensures the widest range of hardware will be able to play it and usually makes them as small as possible.

 

 

Richard

[gshaw]

Very good question! The few I've tried seem to work but that's just standard WMV and AVI (although AVI could be so many different codecs that could be hit and miss as well). Basically I need to watch out for codec issues that would cause problems on users' personal machines, despite the link to a codec pack download it could still cause problems...

[ZeroHour]

Firstly a useful tool for codecs and files: GSpot Codec Information Appliance

Generally I have found mpeg 1 to work on most (mpg 2 wont on xp) but its a bit of a nightmare as there is no one codec. I would probably use flash/silverlight nowadays to get around the hell especially since the HTML 5 standard wont introduce a standard codec (thanks Apple!)