Editing Video footage from a DVD Camcorder

A major drawback of camcorders which use mini DVD discs rather than MiniDV tape is editing - the camera records the footage as a standard DVD VOB structure, and so is not in an edit friendly format.

I've finally found a freely available solution that doesn't plaster nasty watermarks all over the footage - VirtualDubMod. It requires an additional codec to support DV, but it is quite simple and well described on videoforums.co.uk

Once the footage is converted from VOB to DV format avi, it can then be edited via the video editing software of your choice. I normally use Pinnacle (which seemed OK) but also wanted to try out Microsoft Movie Maker since that is what my parents will most likely use. The first converted file I tried opening caused it to crash - but that's probably a separate problem :)

Slow Read/Write CD/DVD Behaviour

I was having problems with single layer DVD burns taking ~50 minutes on my Dell Vostro, when they should have been taking about 8-9 minutes. After some research, I found the culprit - The IDE interface was in PIO mode rather than Ultra DMA.

Windows XP is set to put an IDE interface into PIO mode after a few timeout errors. This is apparently what happened to me after attempting to read a CD with some significant errors on it.

The easiest way (at least for the standard Intel controller) to clear the PIO mode problem is to go into Device Manager, open up the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller, check which IDE channel is in PIO mode then uninstall it. Then go to the top of the list in Device Manager, right click and select Detect new hardware. A few reboots are also par for the course in Windowsland...