Comments on: Apple MOVs with codec m2v1 unreadable under Windows

By: Spyder

Spyder — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:10:56 +0000

You are awesome. Thanks for saving my evening with your powerful little tool

I couldn’t imagine exporting 20 videos in iMovie. With your tool 5 mins of background work and it was all done. no interruption to my day … not to much work on my part … didn’t even need to click a button

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:10:34 +0000

Thank you soooo much!!! I have been looking around for awhile on how to fix this problem. Your tool works! Thanks YOU!!!

By: Badou

Badou — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:31:51 +0000

Thanks a million, this is just GREAT !

By: MindSuburbian

MindSuburbian — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:15:28 +0000

If you use the second tool, it supports jolly chars, so you may just try

m2v1_to -mp2v *.mov

The above command is not working with the first tool, so you can use the .bat in the previous comment.

By: Guest

Guest — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:08:40 +0000

To convert all files in a directoty at once, make a batch file (e.g. all.bat) with this content:

for %%f in (*.mov) do (m2v1_to_mp2v.exe “%%f”)

then start all.bat…

By: sam

sam — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:33:04 +0000

and would you be able to explain in more detail how to apply the patch to a whole directory rather than file by file?

I tried replacing the movie filename in cmd prompt with *.mov but it only patched the first file in the directory.

cheers!!

By: sam

sam — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:22:07 +0000

works a treat!

By: MindSuburbian

MindSuburbian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:34:47 +0000

Hi Rod, thanx for your help!
Unfortunately we’ve checked with some other guys (before your comment) and it seemed that ffmpeg cannot handle some video codecs in MOVs.

So for some MOVs i’m afraid your script above wouldn’t work

By: Rod

Rod — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:36:33 +0000

Thanks for the info, a friend of mine presented me with a dvd full of these that he could not play.
I ended up ripping the audio channels with ffmpeg, merging the channels with sox, then transcoding it into something I know windows media can play.

It’s ugly and I mashed it all into the same directory .. but here it is

setlocal

set List=D:\vids\*.mov

for /f “delims=” %%a in (‘dir /b “%List%”‘) do bin\ffmpeg -i “%%~na.mov” -map 0:1 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ac 1 “%%~na_left.wav”

for /f “delims=” %%a in (‘dir /b “%List%”‘) do bin\ffmpeg -i “%%~na.mov” -map 0:2 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ac 1 “%%~na_right.wav”

for /f “delims=” %%a in (‘dir /b “%List%”‘) do sox\sox -M “%%~na_left.wav” “%%~na_right.wav” -o “%%~na_stereo.wav”

del *_left.wav
del *_right.wav

for /f “delims=” %%a in (‘dir /b “%List%”‘) do bin\ffmpeg -i “%%~na.mov” -i “%%~na_stereo.wav” -deinterlace -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -vcodec wmv2 -b 4000kb -r 29.97 -acodec wmav2 -ar 44100 -ab 128k -aspect 16:9 “%%~na.wmv”

del *_stereo.wav

By: MindSuburbian

MindSuburbian — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:39:48 +0000

Hi Scott,
unfortunately I had no reports like yours.

My guess is that the problem is either in the original software (by Apple) that made the file, or that it’s intrinsically difficult to convert and to skip (it happens sometimes because of a very low number of still full-frames in the data stream: it’s a variable parameter of MPEG files)

I suggest you try some other converting software and set a lower compression ratio for the output.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:20:40 +0000

Hey,

thanks for the crack
one quick question
I got it to work so that it now plays in VLC after turning the files into mp2v however whenever I try and convert it into a different format say MP4 or MPG so that I can view the videos elsewhere or edit them, it starts off ok but the quality just deteroates and after a few seconds its just a mass of pixelated colour.

Also an observation when you try and skip into a video that has used the tool to change its mov type to mp2v VLC just crashes :/

Am I just doing something amateur when trying to convert these files?

Thanks for your time,
Scott

By: Russell

Russell — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:07:44 +0000

Thanks! It worked (the original version)! Much appreciated

By: Dugald

Dugald — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:08:20 +0000

Fantastic, this worked perfectly for us (I had sent the .mov files which were created by iMovie 08 from AVCHD source format from my Sony HDD SD camera).

It was especially important as the files were of wedding video footage and my mate couldn’t see any video, only hearing the audio – on Windows XP.

Cheers from us both!

By: Louis

Louis — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:46:20 +0000

Thanks, I will try that.

Too bad that I couldn`t use the MOV files as they were very large sized so oviously good quality.

Louis

By: MindSuburbian

MindSuburbian — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:49:19 +0000

Unfortunately icod format is only supported by Apple Mac software.

You do not need to send tapes around the world: the best you may do is one of the following
- either bring the tape to someone with a similar videocamera and download the file (sometimes you just need a firewire cable and a videoediting software)
- or bring the file to someone who has a Mac and iLive or iMovie and ask to save the file in another format (H.264 if you need hi-res or just plain AVI DivX/Xvid)

You may just want to search for electronic devices rental near your place and do it yourself.