Simple video clips no longer readable; Too much to ask for?

[ChicagoSlim]

I bought into the apple eco-system in 80s and 90s because things "just worked". I'm starting to question that loyalty. I finally upgraded to a MBP 14" after nursing a beautiful 2010 13" MBP along. Of course many things don't work anymore. But the most irritating issue so far is as follows:

I have thousands of video clips in iPhoto that I imported into Photos in the process of the upgrade (manually, migration assistant no help). This is family history. I just noticed that about 400 clips from 2006-2008 didn't transfer. These are .avi files generated on a Casio Exilim during those years. They have played without issue in QuickTime on multiple old MacBook Pros and Macs, and were previously easily accessed from within iPhoto. After the attempted import into Photos, they don't appear (no warning about this by the way. I just had to notice they were missing). In troubleshooting, in opening one of these files from an external disk I get a message "This file contains some media which isn’t compatible with QuickTime Player. Would you like to open anyway?" When I do, there is just audio available. This is part of the reason I resisted changing my computer for so many years. I anticipated simple things like watching a clip I had watched without issue previously to just mysteriously stop working. I believe I have the latest version of Quicktime. I'm trying to avoid processing all of these files in some sort of format altering program. I really don’t want to lose time/date stamps, as that’s part of the history. I don't think that what I am wanting is too much to ask for: organize old clips that previously could be watched. I mean, half the apple ads show happy folks watching clips on their Macs. Any suggestions? Thank you very much in advance!

 

[appltech]

Heard similar stories about iPhoto->Photos migration.
What I can tell is to use a separate PC/Mac for such purposes with OS that won't be updating, to avoid such problems. (mean a computer that will store all that stuff with known OS and apps, so without rabbits from the hat)
Sure thing without i-net or some dodgy usage, to save from malware, crash, etc.
Or use 3rd party standalone apps to organize your Library (but it's the hard way, I suppose)

 

[ChicagoSlim]

Thank you appltech. Yeah, I still have my old computer and can hopefully maintain that to handle the old files. But the whole idea of an archive is that you have one, and everything is in it. One would hope that Apple with its trillions of dollars of power could maintain compatibility with video files that Mac systems previously opened. The bottom line is that we can't count on these computer systems as archives, even when files are in "standard" formats, stored in "standard" programs (eg iPhoto).

 

[NT1440]

It's the .avi format that's the problem here. You'd either have to convert them or use something like VLC which can play them no problem.

 

[ChicagoSlim]

Thank you NT1440. Yes, I can convert them, but then you lose all the date information, which is part of the documentation for the archive (as in "when did that happen?"). It just seems strange that QT and iPhotos could handle these files, but no longer. Its not an obscure format I don't think. Thank you again.

 

[BrianBaughn]

It's the .avi format that's the problem here. You'd either have to convert them or use something like VLC which can play them no problem.

AVI is a proprietary multimedia container format and Windows standard introduced by Microsoft in November 1992.

A few years back I converted all my AVIs that originated on my old digital cameras to mp4.

HandBrakeBatch has a setting to preserve creation and modification dates but I've never used it…so I don't know if it works.

HandBrakeBatch

I created this site to talk about the applications I used to write. That part of my life is temporarily on pause, but the site lives mainly as my blog.

osomac.com

 

[ChicagoSlim]

Thank you Brian Baughn: the preservation of dates using HandBrake sounds ideal. That would solve my problem. I will give it a try. Thank you.

 

[NT1440]

Thank you Brian Baughn: the preservation of dates using HandBrake sounds ideal. That would solve my problem. I will give it a try. Thank you.

Handbrake is great because you can set up a conversion queue. Set everything up, let it rip over the weekend, you should be good to go shortly.

 

[ian87w]

Yup. Just convert them using Handbrake would be my suggestion as well.

Note that AVI is just a container. I bet that AVI files uses some old video codec that has been deprecated. There are a lot of weird video codecs used by digital cameras back then, and compatibility was a mess even on Windows, forcing users to download codec packs from dodgy websites.

 

[MajorFubar]

I feel for you. This is exactly what people meant twenty years ago with the big transition to digital capture and the 'old folks' with their film cameras and camcorders used to say "let's talk in 20 years time when half of what you're shooting today is in a format not supported by current tech". Hope you get it sorted. Handbrake is a good call.

 

[ColdCase]

Yeah, Apple, like Microsoft, has been depreciating old codecs in their new OSs rather than spending time and money to make the drivers/CODECs/wrappers work with their new instruction sets. When I updated an OS and FCP years ago it found several incompatible videos and offered to convert them. The process moved all the incompatible files in a folder and imported the converted ones into FCP. There was an alert that future OS updates would not support the old files.

I have some 3 year old game cameras that use an AVI format current OSs don't not like. A real PITA for me. I routinely run them through Handbrake to convert them. But there is no meta data for me to deal with.

I would assume iPhoto works the same way, but perhaps that feature is not incorporated. iPhoto is optimized for photos, not video. FCP is video optimized.

As belt and suspenders, I alway save family video as a common mp4 video and use stubler to annotate them. Save them off somewhere. I also keep an old mac around that has an OS that can read the originals. If I'm not mistaken, subler can convert while retaining meta data.

There is some discussion in the Home Theater forum what the topic seems to come up often. https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/apple-tv-and-home-theater.100/

 

[ChicagoSlim]

Thank you ColdCase and everyone for the suggestions and commiseration. I'm hoping I can get handbrake to maintain the date/time created info, because this is an important part of the history. I'm sort of the family archivist. I also went through a process of digitizing all of the ancient 8mm films a few years back. The remarkable thing is that 8mm films from the 1930s were perfectly clear and fine, and I could easily digitize them, 80-90 years after their generation. What hope do our ancestors have of dealing with the hodgepodge of files and formats 90 years from now. What % will be useable? I can't even open my PhD thesis file (in MS Word from the 90s) except to extract out raw, unformatted text without figures. The really precious clips I am burning onto gold DVDs. Precious documents I print on paper. I'm irritated with Apple for not maintaining a functionality that they had in previous systems, after we got comfortable with using it as a repository for precious history.

 

[systemBuilder]

I used to work on DASH (adaptive video streaming) which has now become the worldwide standard for streaming video, it competes with and beat HLS from Apple and Silverlight from Microsoft (microsoft was onboard in helping to establish DASH, "we hacked together silverlight for the beijing olympics in 2008 we don't even know how it works any more!").

What I learned from the committee members (DASH chair was on my team) was that MPEG is full of a bunch of television bigots, they refused to ever specify a PC file format for the various flavors of MPEG - MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, H.265. They didn't want to give PC users an easy time adopting "our broadcast standard - all we need is framing for DVB and ATSC transmitters and receivers". Hence, there are a million file formats for MPEG video, but they just influence how the metadata is stored - name of the file, markers during playback, indexes, closed captions, aspect ratio, attributes such as date & time & gps location, unimportant stuff to most people - nothing that influences playback quality!

When people say that avi is a proprietary standard - well, everything back then was "a proprietary standard" for the same MPEG-2 encoding bits because the open standards committee refused to do an open standard! Macromedia got lucky as their "Flash" video container format was adopted by YouTube! So from 2005 - ~2015, Macromedia flash was the most popular video file container!

Don't be afraid to convert your video to a different container for MPEG-2 that is more common. There are very few compression schemes outside of MPEG (Google's VP8 is the only one I can think of). There will likely be no loss of quality in converting to a different file format for MPEG-2. You aren't converting the video, just the file container that wraps the compressed video, if you use a good converter, it should have zero impact on quality!

When people say "I need a new codec" that's an exaggeration, what they actually need is a new piece of software that can unwrap the file container format, the MPEG codec is a piece of open software that decodes the video - which is the same for 90% of all "codecs".

If you are wanting to future-proof your video, though, I would probably convert it to MP4. You might be able to edit it to add back the date information. I don't know for certain but I think that standard (like roman roads) will be around in 20, 50, and maybe even 100 years ...

Best wishes and good luck !!

 

[BrianBaughn]

Thank you Brian Baughn: the preservation of dates using HandBrake sounds ideal. That would solve my problem. I will give it a try. Thank you.

You need HandBrake for sure but I think you have to use HandBrakeBatch as a front-end to have the dates preserved.

 

[ChicagoSlim]

You need HandBrake for sure but I think you have to use HandBrakeBatch as a front-end to have the dates preserved.

Thank you for the correction Brian.

 

[ervinjason]

I bought into the apple eco-system in 80s and 90s because things "just worked". I'm starting to question that loyalty. I finally upgraded to a MBP 14" after nursing a beautiful 2010 13" MBP along. Of course many things don't work anymore. But the most irritating issue so far is as follows:

I have thousands of video clips in iPhoto that I imported into Photos in the process of the upgrade (manually, migration assistant no help). This is family history. I just noticed that about 400 clips from 2006-2008 didn't transfer. These are .avi files generated on a Casio Exilim during those years. They have played without issue in QuickTime on multiple old MacBook Pros and Macs, and were previously easily accessed from within iPhoto. After the attempted import into Photos, they don't appear (no warning about this by the way. I just had to notice they were missing). In troubleshooting, in opening one of these files from an external disk I get a message "This file contains some media which isn’t compatible with QuickTime Player. Would you like to open anyway?" When I do, there is just audio available. This is part of the reason I resisted changing my computer for so many years. I anticipated simple things like watching a clip I had watched without issue previously to just mysteriously stop working. I believe I have the latest version of Quicktime. I'm trying to avoid processing all of these files in some sort of format altering program. I really don’t want to lose time/date stamps, as that’s part of the history. I don't think that what I am wanting is too much to ask for: organize old clips that previously could be watched. I mean, half the apple ads show happy folks watching clips on their Macs. Any suggestions? Thank you very much in advance!

Heard similar stories about iPhoto->Photos migration.

What I can tell is to use a separate PC/Mac for such purposes with OS that won't be updating, to avoid such problems. (mean a computer that will store all that stuff with known OS and apps, so without rabbits from the hat)

Sure thing without i-net or some dodgy usage, to save from malware, crash, etc.

Or use 3rd party standalone apps to organize your Library (but it's the hard way, I suppose)

 

[admwright]

Another tool to check is Mpeg StreamClip (http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html). It is very old now, but if you have an old Mac (or VM) you should be able to run it. I found it useful in the past for changing the container for video files. Because it is just writing the file to a new container it is very fast and does not need any transcoding. (If it takes more than a few seconds you know you got the settings wrong - so just check again.) I am not sure about file dates but would it be possible to script copying from the original to the new file, maybe in Automator?