by siyb

Two weeks ago I was looking for a pen to label a Debian netinstall CD. I went to my sister’s room and while looking for a suitable writing device, I found the camcorder she had gotten for Christmas some years ago. I convinced her to lent me the cam, because she doesn’t really use it, but she also warned me that it was hell to cut and edit the videos, due to the fact that the format JVC uses to store video content could not be read by her computer.

I connected the camera to my laptop using the provided USB cable and copied one of the movie files (.MOD file) to my hard drive. Perhaps you should know that I am using windows at the moment, anyway I tried playing the file in VLC, which did not work at all. I read around a bit on the net and found out that .MOD is in fact an audio file format and that the .MOD format used by some JVC and Panasonic devices is appears to be MPEG-2 format. After renaming the file endings to mpg everything worked just fine.

The question is why big companies like JVC and Panasonic impose such barriers to their potentially ignorant costumers. For some people it’s hard enough to turn on the camcorder, what is the point of renaming mpg files to mod, in the end there is always someone who needs to rename them back. In this case I am that “someone” and I’m pissed, 50 video files need renaming … excellent work.