Steve,
Thank you for your helpful post. Video data in .MOV format is not uncommon, and users need to know how to convert .MOV video files into a format supported by FMV.
Just a little general background for our users:
A codec is a compression standard that compresses raw video when encoding and decompresses the data upon playback. Examples of codecs are H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.
A format is a file container that holds one or more codecs. Examples of container formats include .MOV, MP2 and MP4.
Thus, .MOV is a container format, while H.264 is a codec.
The recommendation to change the video file extension from .MOV to .H264 is generally true for new sensors since Apple adopted the H.264 codec for the .MOV file format. A simple solution that will work in many cases - users should try this first and see if the video works in FMV. However, older .MOV files or older sensors may utilize a codec different from H.264 and may not work in the FMV application.
In the latter case, and as a general practice, we recommend that users explicitly convert their .MOV, etc. files into any of the 12 common file types supported by FMV. The supported file types include .ps, .ts, .mpg, .mpeg, .mp2, .mpg2, .mpeg2, .mp4, .mpg4, .mpeg4, .h264, .vob, or .m2ts. For best video quality-to-file size ratio, we suggest MP4 using the h264 codec. VLC is an excellent open source, free, multimedia player that converts between different formats (i.e., encapsulation) and codecs.
Note: the VLC media player does not recognize MISB-compliant metadata, so if your video has MISB data encoded, it will be stripped away in the conversion process. I'm not aware of any sensors that produce MISB-compliant video data in .MOV format, but if in doubt, change the file extension first to see if this works.
Jeff