Why won't my Canon let me upload my .avi movie?

October 22, 2007 7:26 PM

I recently shot an 8min .avi video with my Canon point 'n' shoot (SD800 IS). Now, I'm unable to upload the file onto ANY of my computers (pc, macbook, ibook). Is the 1gig .avi file just too big?

I get an different error on each machine, with the PC saying there's not enough room to import the file (despite hundreds of gigs of room), the Macbook saying the import failed, and the ibook simply stalling out.

I can play the video on the camera, so I know it's ok. I can import other photos and video from the camera, so I know that the USB connection is ok. So why can't any of my computers deal with this file?

posted by arielmeadow to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Similar question here with a few program suggestions.
posted by jmd82 at 7:55 PM on October 22, 2007

.avi is a funny format that can be hard to deal with.

On the Mac, you can download Flip4Mac and try that. (Instal it then double click the file. It should launch in Quicktime but may take quite a while to load as QT Player needs to read in the whole file to play it.

If that doesn't work, try Perian. I found it did not work too well with .avi files however.

FFMpegX has generally worked well for me... you can translate .avi files to pretty much any format you like.

Most recently I have been using VisualHub for all my video conversion needs, including .avi. It works brilliantly, but I think it just leverages the ffmpeg library, like FFmpegx.

(By the way, if you install Perian and it doesn't work, uninstall it in the pref pane before trying any of the other solutions or they may not work).

Remember to quit and restart QuickTime Player after installing any new QT components or it won't pick them up.

One of these solutions should work. If not, mail me at the address in my profile and I'll try to help you out.
posted by unSane at 8:00 PM on October 22, 2007

BTW, 1Gb is not too big. I have successfully converted > 1Gb.avi files on the mac. You may run into a limit on some flavors of Windows however.
posted by unSane at 8:02 PM on October 22, 2007

are you trying to transfer the file directly from your camera? if you are, try using a card reader to import instead.
posted by lia at 9:27 PM on October 22, 2007