Schollii's Sandals and Socks

The JVC-Everio HDD Camcorder is very nice but the software that comes with it (PowerProducer etc) sucks. The cam has an internal Hard disk drive (HDD), on which video gets stored in digital format. On Windows XP, viewing the video is much harder than it ought to be, MUCH harder. The process is simple once figured out:

1. make sure camera is off
2. plug its USB cable at front of camera
3. plug other end of USB cable to your PC
4. open camera viewer (side panel)
5. in the viewer panel, select first item, something like “send to PC”
6. this changes the cam to a USB mass storage device (ie an external HDD) attached to your PC
7. open file explorer and browse to the newly added removable disk
8. there is a folder that has .MOD and .MOI files; each pair is one clip
9. copy the .MOD and .MOI file pairs to your PC
10. get the ac3_filter codec, which is required to properly decode the sound for those types of video files, unzip it and run the setup program you find there
11. now you can double-click any of the .MOD files to play using default Windows XP player (typically, Windows Media Player)

The codec to obtain (ac3 filter) is mentioned in the very useful post http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/20742p1.html, which also had other interesting tidbits of info related to .MOD files.

Step 10 is the tricky part and interestingly, is not required on Windows 7 (don’t know about Vista). In step 11, Windows Media Player or even VLC will both play the .MOD files correctly on Windows 7. If you need to convert to different file format, one of the best free tools (based on google search for reviews and download stats) seems to be Any Video Converter, but I have not tried it.

To save the files to DVD as data (ie as files to be read/played on a PC rather than in a format that could be used in a DVD player)

1. Install ImgBurn
2. Run it
3. Select the files to write to DVD
4. Put DVD in your DVD writer
5. Trigger the writing via button
6. You’re done!