HandBrake came to my rescue, yet again, at work yesterday. A teacher brought in her JVC Everio HDD video camera with some footage on it. Plugging the camera into her mac and trying to import into iMovie failed. We had a quick look inside the disk that mounted and discovered the video was in .MOD files. A quick google found lots of folk wanting to convert these files. We tried MPEG Streamclip but it wanted us to buy an extra bit of software: QuickTime – MPEG-2 Playback. The next guess on my part was Handbreak, this has converted a few things for me including ripping video from those cameras that record to DVD. Pointing Handbreak at the MOD files converted them to m4v files that opened in quicktime and could be imported into iMovie.

Video cameras and formats can cause a bit of a problem if you don’t check the editing possibilities before you buy, Handbrake can help if you are stuck with a camera that you didn’t research. I have never had the time to look at all of Handbreak’s features and setting but it does a pretty good job of making you look knowledgeable at the default settings.

If you have to deal with video it is a good tool to have in your toolkit.

Update: Looks like it could have been simpler, this tweet from islyian

@johnjohnston John Rename .MOD files to .AVI and most editors recognise it

Would have saved me some time.