Is there any way in the world to view an MPG stored on your hard drive, or on a CD, on your TV or Digital Video Cam?????!!!!

I have 4 programs that play mpg's.

1. Windows Media Player. Just plays the videos. Doesnt output to my video capture card.

2. Windows Movie Maker. Captures vid, doesnt send it to output tho.

3. MGI Video Wave III. SUPPOSED to output to Digital Cam. Does not.

4. Pinnacle Studio DV. Praise the lord, DOES output video, but only AVI's. I WANT TO VIEW MPGS ON MY TV. Can this be done?????

-- John (wmtl99a@prodigy.com), July 24, 2001

Answers

One way of doing what you want is by hardware, specifically, a codec that can specifically output MPEG to TV. One such h/w is the DXR3 MPEG-1/2 decoder card that comes with the Creative PC-DVD kit, but can also be obtained alone (w/o the DVD-ROM drive). A s/w player/controller program will come with such cards which can then display on TV DVDs, VCDs, or individual compliant MPEG-1/2 files sitting on your HDD. I say compliant, because, for example, if your MPEG file has a framerate of 15fps, it may not be displayed on the TV at all; only 25fps or 29.97fps may be legit (these are the only two allowed framerates of conventional analogue video).

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), July 24, 2001.

You are having format issues. To your original question, the answer is no. MPG is not a format used by the DV camera. You would have to convert your MPG files to a AVI DV format. Your Pinnacle Studio DV should be able to do this but I'm not sure, if not use MGI Video Wave and make sure you use the DV AVI format. You also asked about CDs. Video CDs do use MPG files. Look on other posts from this forum for more information on making and playing Video CDs. You would probably have to encode your MPG files to make them Video CD ready. When the Video CD is done, it can be played on most DVD players. Hope this helps. If you need any help with the DV thing email me.

-- Jake (jlink84@yahoo.com), July 24, 2001.

One way to view PC video on a TV is:

1) get a VGA to TV converter to connect the VGA out of the video adapter card to the TV video in 2) connect audio out of the sound card to TV audio in 3) play your video at full screen (make sure to resize to 640x480 first)

Another way is to get a video card that has TV output.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), July 24, 2001.