[ksfrogman]

I recently purchased a Sony DCR-HC36, which takes decent videos, but it is so difficult to transfer media to my comp. The crappy software that comes with the camera saves video to CD-RW ONLY? WTF? Why won't it let me save to hard drive?

I took some nice video footage of the Bimmerfest '06, and want to share it, but the files saved to my CD-R are .dat files. When I convert them to windows media files, they play at a faster than normal rate.

I then went to downloads.com, and installed 2-3 different programs, but none of them detect that my Handycam is connected to the comp. Btw, my videocam is connected via USB cable to the comp. Should I have a different type of connector? The manual says something about i.Link--is this some sort of hotwire?

Why does this have to be so difficult? This is frustrating.

[deutschmann59]

When you connect the USB plug, can you use microsoft camera wizard?

[ksfrogman]

Originally Posted by sharp1183

When you connect the USB plug, can you use microsoft camera wizard?

That's not something that pops up automatically. Where do I find that?

[deutschmann59]

When you have the USB connected, go to Start>Settings>Control Panel>Scanners and Cameras. I don't know if this works for video cameras, but it might. There's got to be a way to transfer video info to the hard drive.

Here are some other thoughts:

1) Just copy the video file to a CD-RW and then copy the disc to the hard drive
2) Does your video card have a video capture feature? On some video cards, you can plug the RCA wires into your video card and capture the video and audio by playing on the camera and "recording" on the video card.

Another question, though. You said they are saved as .DAT files. WTF? The .dat file probably works along with sony's software, but somewhere along the line, these files were once .mpegs, .avi, etc. So there's got to be a way to convert them back to raw video files.

Have you tried to google "sony .dat to .mpeg converter" or something like that? If you do a raw encode and convert to a windows media file, chances are it will be messed up (as you've stated the framerate is too fast). So there's got to be a program that will convert these files into raw video files (after all, DVD players need .vob video/audio files in order to recognize the file, not a ".dat". Same thing with VCDs and SVCDS [which are .mpeg files]).

Let me know what you come up with.

[ksfrogman]

Thanks for the detailed answers. I did transfer the CD content to my hard drive, but unfortunately, my CD-RW needs to be replaced. It works only part of the time. I assembled my home comp several years ago and it runs a Pentium III 800 MHz chip--don't laugh. I have since replaced the CD-RW drive 2 to 3 times. It's so bad now that the door has to be manually opened using a paper clip in the round slot.