Last Christmas my parents got me a Canon FS100 video camera. I had asked for a video camera to take videos of my son. I honed my video editing skills a bit before he arrived, but am still working on it. The camera uses flash memory, and records videos in .mod files, which are basically just .mpg files. Although the camera is not HD (the HD version was more than twice as expensive), it does have the option of recording in 16:9 widescreen. I have been using Kino to do my editing, with some success. One problem I had was that if I used Kino to import the files from the camera, the aspect ratio got messed up. Kino would treat the file as 4:3 aspect ratio, even though I had the settings to 16:9. Then it would pad the sides with black space. I saw others complaining about this problem as well, but did not find anyone with a solution. Eventually, I decided to try my hand with ffmpeg myself. After some playing around, I determined that I could create a dv file from the .mod file with ffmpeg, open the .dv with Kino, do some editing, export, and then convert again.

First the conversion from .mod to .dv

ffmpeg -i MOV001.MOD -target dv -aspect 16:9 MOV001.dv


Then I open the .dv file in Kino and edit it, and export to raw dv, making sure to uncheck the options for splitting into separate files and for resampling audio

Finally, I convert the dv to flv to put on my blog:

ffmpeg -i infile.dv -b 325k -ar 22050 -ab 24k -s 480x270 -aspect 16:9 outfile.flv


You can see the result on the fedibblety blog