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The JVC Everio GZ-MG77 HDD camcorder is not what I hoped it would be.

I purchased the camera, looking for an affordable solution to my digital video needs. As a home user, I can imagine the convenience of 37 hours of video would be worthwhile. The compact casing is easy to hold and manage, and easy enough to mount on a tri-pod, but my unit has numerous scratches and scars after just a few uses.

The camera's selling point is it's ability to record digitally, and then transfer those files to a computer for editing and archiving.

I've found the picture quality reasonable for my applications, but the biggest draw back was that the included software is not compatible with a Mac.

Anyone who knows about digital video, knows that Macintosh is in the forefront for video editing. After speaking with JVC on the telephone (which several hours of wait time, and several hours of "Could you say that again? I can't understand you?", which is typical of modern tech support... They never could resolve a solution for me to convert the videos to a usable format.

They referred me to a japanese software manufacturer, whose website appeared to be translated using babel-fish, and I was able to download some software that took about ten times as long as the run time for conversion. So much for ease of use.

The video files are in a .mod format, which I could not convert with ANY standard application. .mod apparently is another form of .m2v, and after some research, I discovered that after changing the filename extensions, .m2v files can be converted to almost any other form with a freeware application called ffmpegX.

This process is still time consuming, but much less so than the recommended Mac software.

I've also found that the camera lacks a microphone jack, leaving camera users to suffer with a substandard on board microphone that can't handle any wind, traffic, or heavy breathing from the camera operator.

So when JVC offers the camera's at affordable prices, I would firmly stand by my grandmother's adage, "You get what you pay for."

Learn more about this author, Josh Hatcher.
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