newbie needing major help

[kpnj]

hi there - thank you in advance for your help! i just purchased a panasonic SDR-H18 video camera that creates mpeg 2 videos. i am running a mac and hoped i could used imovie 6.03 to edit and then burn the movies to dvd. but it doesn't work. i called apple and they suggested vlc to work with the mpeg 2 files. but now how do i export (or save) the mpeg 2 files in vlc to a format (including the video and audio channels) that my imovie will recognize? sorry, because i need step by step instructions to do this as i used to be technically savvy, but am just not anymore obviously! apple did say there was no reason for me to upgrade to the new ilife nor any reason to upgrade to leapord (which i was happy about). don't want to spend any more $$ on things i don't need at this point. thank you!

[kpnj]

sorry, but am i on the right board for this? or should i have posted it on a different one? thank you!

[fkuehne]

Interesting to see yet another recommendation by Apple to use VLC.

You can encode your files to MPEG4 / H.264, which is well understood by iMovie. Just open up the Streaming / Transcoding Wizard, select Transcoding, select your file, choose "h264" as video codec (or "mp4v" for faster, but uglier results) and "mp4a" as audio codec and "mp4" as encapsulation format. Then just wait.

[lsloan]

Mr. Kühne,

Thanks for the information. I've gotten that to work with some FLV files, but not all. I want to convert FLVs for use with iDVD. I'm using VLC 0.8.6c on Mac OS X 10.4.11, with these transcoding settings:

Video codec: MPEG-4 Video, 1024 kb/s
Audio codec: MPEG-4 Audio, 192 kb/s
Encapsulation format: MPEG 4

I used those settings with an FLV from collegehumor.com and it produced an MP4 file that worked great with iDVD. I also note that the original FLV played without error in VLC.

When I tried this with some FLVs from youtube.com, I got this error at the beginning of the transcoding process:

ffmpeg: cannot open encoder
stream_out_transcode: cannot find encoder ((null))
stream_out_transcode: cannot create audio chain
main: cannot create packetizer output (mp3 )

The resulting MP4s had various things wrong with them. Some had no audio and some would not work with iDVD at all. I also tried using the H.264 codec with the same results. With H.264, sometimes only part of the video (without audio) was converted.

I should also say that the original FLVs from youtube.com did play in VLC, but they all caused this error:

equalizer: rate not supported
main: cannot add user filter equalizer (skipped)

I presume this has something to do with the way youtube.com encodes their videos. Is there some setting that will make this work with VLC? I don't understand why applications like VLC or Miro can play youtube.com FLVs, but VLC's transcoder can't convert them.