Doc's HD Video Server

This video was done last summer using an SD camcorder.

I was a little bit bored today with not much work to do. I downloaded the clips from my old JVC SD camcorder to disk. The JVC used the .MOD file extension which in reality is just a common MPG file, but JVC had to make it proprietary so only their crappy software could be used to produce a movie!

To get my Cyberlink Powerdirector 8 to read the clips, I had to rename them to MPG’s. Being an MS DOS guru from the old days i find it easier to use the rename command in a msdos or command prompt window to do the renaming. I changed to the folder i put the files into “CD\SDCLIPS” and hit enter. A “DIR” command showed all the files with .MOD extensions in there. I just did a rename command “REN *.MOD *.MPG” (without the quotes) and hit enter. You can also use the old dos “COPY” command to copy those files to new extensions, “COPY *.MOD *.MPG”. I then loaded the clips into my Powerdirector, added a little sharpness video enhancement, then produced them into an HD 1080i format that ended up being 3.9 Gigabytes in size.

Next step was to convert the mpg file to a streamable FLV format using a file converter utility. Cyberlink has no plans to add flash format to Powerdirector, which is a shame as Flash video streaming is becoming more popular every day. I ended up using AVS Video Converter to do the file conversion, then ran the converted file through Rich FLV beta to inject the meta data that allows http pseudo streaming. The final size of the streaming file after conversion is 204 Megabytes.

It took close to 2 hours to produce this 20 minute clip in 1080i, and another 45 minutes to convert it to FLV format using an Intel Pentium 4, 2.66 MHZ with 2 GB Ram. Adding the meta data only took a few seconds.  There are 3 clips with either no audio or a buzzing sound, I was using my computer for other things during the production process that probably caused the audio problems.

And here are the results. It’s not bad considering the source clips were in SD Video format. You can full screen the player by clicking the <> on the player control bar.