One of the minor gripes I have about my digital camera is that it stores the MPEG4 videos I records in Apple’s Quicktime format. Not only does this format not speed up time in any way, it’s also hard to process or convert to other file formats. I would have preferred AVI, simply because its far more common on Windows PCs and pretty much any software can load and save AVI files.

While googling for a good converter I came across MP4Cam2AVI. If you can decipher it, the name pretty much says it all. It converts typical digicam MOVs to AVI. And most importantly, it does so without decoding and re-encoding the actual image data stream. Unlike with other solutions the image quality is not affected, it simply changes the video’s file container to AVI. That takes less than a second on my PC, and if you like, MP4Cam2AVI can batch process multiple files for you.

I’ve never been a loyal customer when it comes to graphic cards in my PC. If I remember correctly I went from an S3 card to a Matrox G100, a G200, a nVidia geForce 256, a cheap ATI card and now I’m back with nVidia. During all this the only real driver trouble I’ve had was with the Matrox cards, which could not render OpenGL games. But today I found out that nVidia’s Vista drivers do not feature nView.
(more…)