Simple Video Editing Part II (It really is never simple)

So… I tried what feels like a hack to get my MP4 video to open in VirtualDub.

Two problems now present themselves

1. Although I can see the first frame, and can skip to any frame in the file, I can’t play it. This in itself shouldn’t stop me, but I find it so irritating, that I can’t bring myself to use this AviSynth + VirtualDub method
2. I can save the audio track from VirtualDub, but it is unusable. When I open it in Audacity, it plays at something like 10x normal speed. I haven’t got to the bottom of what is wrong there

So, I am reluctantly going to re-encode clips I want to use. This is a problem because:

1. It takes time. Encoding is several times slower than realtime on my aging Athlon XP processor, and worse on my Intel Core 2 Duo
2. There is an inevitbale loss in quality - though whether I can see this on video that has effectively been taken on a pinhole camera, remains to be seen

Currently I’m converting using the SourceForge hosted project: MP4Cam2AVI Easy Converter - which I suspect was born from someone else’s frustrations at trying to accomplish the same thing.

I will re-encode using “XVid MPEG-4 TV HD 16:9”, and PCM (uncompressed audio)