Video files won't open on Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker

[melart]

We have a Sony Handycam DCR-DVD150E (through Tesco scheme). The pupils/teachers want to film video and then use Windows Movie Maker to create movies or Windows Media Player to show videos to pupils for reviewing.

 

We tried it out filming some pupils doing a "news" programme in a classroom but have had 2 issues:

 

1. Windows Media Player won't open the files and neither will Windows Movie Maker which the teachers want to use to create movies with the pupils. The files are mpg format.

 

2. I installed the Picture Motion Browser software (locally on my pc) that came with the camera so that I could view the video but the sound quality is very bad - can hardly hear the pupils and we were only about 2m away when filming? Teachers are also wanting to video their assemblies in the hall but the camera would be from even further away so I'm guessing this camera is not suitable? If we have to purchase a better quality camera for filming productions/assemblies which camera would you recommend?

 

As we have a CC4 network I don’t want to have to install the PMB on all computers in the school.

 

How do we use Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player to work with video files?

[Dom_]

Have you got any codecs installed on the machine you're trying to view the videos on? If not, try install K-lite

 

I've used a similar camera to that before, which had an external mic option in the settings... when enabled and no mic was plugged in the sound quality was awful, so it might be worth checking for that?

[fedora_explorer]

I second K-lite. I use it on my machines and it will play practically anything now.

[SpuffMonkey]

I think Movie Maker only really likes wmv files - so you may need to convert the files for use in that