Video Codec Woes

Hey ... you do video on your computer, you're going to run into problems (eventually).

So, my problem was that I couldn't seem to edit videos from my pocket digital cameras. I have an S400 and an SD500 Canon Powershot camera.

I recently decided to do some editing of my digital camera video. First a little background.

I had mentioned to a list I belong to that I had successfully edited Canon Powershot video using Adobe's Premier Elements. Problem. I had edited the video on a notebook computer. I figured the codec to read the Canon video was a part of Premier Elements ... so ...

I installed Premier Elements on my desktop. First I tried to view some of the camera videos with the full Premier Pro V1.5 program. No go! I'd figured there was that codec issue that installing Elements would cure. Now I figured that the codec was tied closely to Elements. So, I started Elements and tried to view the same video file. Again, no go!! So, I apparently did NOT have the right codec on the desktop but I did on the Sony Vaio Notebook.

I went to Google and started looking up stuff like "canon powershot video codec can't". I soon turned up a bunch of stuff that indicated the codec was something rather difficult to find and definitely wasn't packaged with the Adobe programs. Finally someone mentioned the actual codec used, "mjpg" or Motion JPEG. The author of that message also outlined how to determine just what codec is used in any AVI file. Open the AVI in a text editor. In the header, first few lines, look for the word "vids". Whatever immediately follows is the codec. In a canon AVI file copied and pasted it is: vidsmjpg.

So, is this codec installed or not? And how do you see what codecs are in fact installed?

In Windows XP open the Control Panel. Click on Sound and Audio Devices. When that dialog opens click on ?? Hardware. I guess a codec is hardware?! Ok, scroll down to the bottom of the list of "hardware" devices, find "Video Codecs" and highlight it and click Properties. On the "Video Codec Properties" page click the Properties tab. A listing of all video codecs appears. Now the problem is, what is "msrle32.dll", for instance. Sometimes a Google search will tell you. In any case, there wasn't any specific mention of MJPG, and no googling up the other named codecs indicated they would decode this type of video.

After peeking inside of my control panel and not finding it, I started looking for this "difficult to find" codec. One great place to visit is:

http://www.fourcc.org/codecs.php

The authors of that page occasionally include links to sites that have the codecs you need. Their listing for MJPG did have 3 links. Two of them go to the same place, Pegasus.

I believe the "difficult to find" aspect revolves around the word "free". All the codecs I discovered cost something but were easy to find via both google and the website immediately above.

I ended up purchasing the Pegasus codec:

http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm

It had a try before you buy. It does watermark the demo version video but you can see if it is working OK. There were other systems out there that offered free demos too. They might not watermark, so you may want to investigate further.

Anyway, I installed this codec, it worked. I paid for it, the watermark disappeared. I can now deal with my camera's video files just fine

And, after all this, I went over to my sony notebook and did the above control panel investigation and found no reference to mjpg and couldn't google up any cross ref to any of the codecs it uses to decode that type of video. So, it is still a bit alchemical. The sony has the codecs built in as I can edit the canon video over there but it took an installation of the codec on the desktop to accomplish that feat "here".

So, for any folks who were under the impression that Adobe video editors came with a codec for MJPG or Canon Cameras, that statement by me on the email list was erroneous. You need to find, download, install and pay for one from a third party.