Digital Home Thoughts: Converting Your Type 1 to Type 2 DV-AVI Files

There are two types of DV-AVI files: Type 1 and Type 2. In most instances, if you're lucky, you'll never need to know this and it will never be an issue with the software you're using. I once had a software engineer from muvee explain what the difference was to me, but I don't recall what he said and the Oracle at Google isn't helping me out much.

Suffice it to say that there are some applications on the market, such as muvee, that capture DV-AVI video and store it in Type 1 format. And there are some applications, such as Pinnacle Studio 8, that can only read Type 2 formats. This results in a big fat error message when you try to import a video to work with. I used to curse and swear at the Pinnacle software for not supporting Type 1, but now I have a simple solution if I'm ever faced with this problem again: Ulead's DV-AVI converter.

It's a simple 100 KB EXE file that does one thing: it converts a Type 1 DV-AVI file to a Type 2 DV-AVI file - that's it. You might never need this free app, but when you do, you'll find it priceless.