In a previous entry I discussed some of the tribulations of getting usable video off the Panasonic SV-AV50. While the 15fps video captured in "super fine" mode can be easily converted from Linux, the 30fps video from the "extra fine" mode is codec encumbered. I've finally figured out how to rescue it. First you must install the video codec for Windows Media Player that comes on the CD which comes with the camera (p_mpeg4.dll). Then you need to install AsfTools and separately also install Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Once those are installed (and you've rebooted), fire up AsfTools, select the ASF file that you want to free and click on "Re-Encode". This will convert it to a new asf using a different codec. To then convert it from new-asf to an avi, you can then select "Convert to avi", though I still recommend converting to avi using the method described in the previous blog entry as the output seems to be more universally playable.

Can anyone confirm this? I'm working here to convert some video that I shot of Jimmy Wales discussing wikipedia and was relegated to my Windows machine because of the file format. I attempted to use the Windows double-press Prnt-Scrn (its a button on your keyboard) trick to do an entire screen capture and then paste it into Windows Paint. Except, when I pasted it in Windows paint, I got the whole screen capture but where the paused video frame should be, it only shows a grey square. Has Microsoft gone out of its way to limit me from accessing my personally owned (soon to be creative commons) work? Below is a meta-screen capture of what Microsoft paint looks like on my machine. Of course, I'm just going to grab the frame from Linux now that I've got it converted, but this is a bit ridiculous.

UPDATE: mibus commented that this is just due to hardware acceleration. If you turn off hardware acceleration in the Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot, you can grab video. Thanks for promptly pointing this out. I should also note that with ksnapshot in Linux, it just works without tweaking anything.