I must admit that I was exceedingly frustrated that I could not use Apple's iDVD and iMovie to capture and edit videos that I took of my kids’ music recital on the new, state-of-the-art DVD camcorder that I purchased to record the occasion.

To start with, DVD camcorders don’t come with a FireWire port, so the cable that I was accustomed to using with my MAC in conjunction with my previous tape-based camcorder was useless. Included with the camcorder was a USB cable, though. “Ahah!” I thought, “Now we can get going.” I thought wrong!

After connecting the two with the USB cable, I could see that my MAC could sense that camera was present, but it couldn’t recognise it as a peripheral drive nor could it see the files stored on the media. Dead in the proverbial water once again!

Fortunately, I had a version of Pixela’s VRF Browser software close at hand. Saved! Actually, I was saved twice-over: DVD camcorders store recorded video in the MPEG 2.0 file format, which is commonly supported in the Windows PC world, but only marginally so by MACs. So, even if I had been able to see what was on the camera’s DVD drive, neither iDVD nor iMovie would have been able to do much at all with the MPEG files without cumbersome conversion to the older DV format that tape-based camcorders use. I won’t even go into quality loss in file conversion!

But that wasn’t the end of the story…the VRF Browser not only allowed me to view my videos on my new camcorder and to select which ones that I wanted to import onto my MAC for editing, it also included a simple editing tool which allowed me to perform a rough edit of the recital videos right on the camera. It was a huge help to get my clips organized prior to downloading them to my MAC for more refined editing.

VRF Browser is available at: