I've been struggling to get SD files off my camcorder to work on the Mac.

After some digging around, I realise that only iMovie version 8 onwards supports MPEG2 files

No problem, I go on apple's website, and download imovie8.

I go to install the update and it then moans that I don't have the correct version of OSX I currently have 10.4 and looks like imovie8 needs 10.5 leopard as a minimum.

No problem, I go back to apple's website, and then realise that this is a costed upgrade of $130 or so :mad:

So if I'm right, I now need to pay $130 just to be able to read MPEG2 files in imovie for very simple DVD authoring :thumbdwn:

Is there any way around this? Should I be using different software that's free? Is there a way of fooling imovie8 or is there a hack / patch on imovie6 which is what I currently have to get to playback MPEG2 files?

TIA

VLC media player - Open Source Multimedia Framework and Player

If that doesn't play it, nothing will

I have a Mac aswell Although i have Leopard and the latest iMovie

I always use VLC however as as has been said above it that doesn't play it nothing will

Carl:thumbup:

Thanks for the VLC offer but it doesn't offer DVD video burning does it? Sorry, I should have asked.

The beauty about grabbing 6Mbps MPEG2 files was that no transcoding would be required to dump to DVD so it should be a very quick and easy process.

How to Create a DVD - VideoLAN Wiki

Doesn't provide the answer, and tbh, neither do I know of any other DVD authoring tools. Sorry :(

If you can play a video in VLC you can also use it to convert it to almost any other format so in theory you could play your MPEG2 video and transcode it to something like avi or quicktime and then import that into iMovie for your DVD authoring process.

I know its a bit long winded but it might save you 130 notes. The only issue I can see is that from memory VLC transcodes at 1:1 so depending on how much footage you have it may take a while!

I used VLC myself recently to transcode about 16 FLV format videos off the web so I could splice the together to create a continous DVD using iMovie.

Hope this helps, from a fellow fruit user,

Rich

Well, he's gone out and bought the upgrade dvd for about £87 IIRC.

We'll just have to make sure the "upgrade" option is selected so we don't lose the existing imovie6 so we can then upgrade to imovie8

Did get VLC though and that works a charm