For weeks I have been trying some of the freeware conversion and muxing utilities to get a transport stream recognizable by the camera.

After several steps I can create transport streams, and stream them back to the camera but the camera's lcd displays "Cannot decode audio or video".

I have a JVC SR-VD400US DVHS deck, last Friday I decided to try to export to the deck instead, I haven't tried this earlier because I thought the deck and the camera would more or less act the same, then I heard that for $5000 Heuris doesn't let you go back to the camera either, only a DVHS deck.

Well I can at least see the transport streams from the deck, they are playing at twice the speed and are at less than an optimum bit-rate however.

I exported from FCP using Quicktime conversion into a quicktime with MPEG4 encoding, used mencoder OSX to go to DIVX4 then used VLC to convert to transport stream and then DVHSCap to go back to the Deck.
VLC has a limit on the bit-rate of 15Mbs, lower than that of the camera (19Mbps?). Also the deck complained about "multiple iLink devices" even though I only had the one firewire plugged into the Mac.

This is very far from being a solution at this point, I am posting this early, hoping somebody else will start working in the same direction, and we can find a free way to export from the Mac

Interesting.

Try upconverting to 1080i and see if you can capture and edit. Even put back onto DVHS.

heath

A kludgy hack has allowed me to get bit rates higher than 15Mbs in mpeg2enc
I removed the following lines from conform.cc
if (bit_rate> 1.0e6 * maxval->bit_rate)
mjpeg_error_exit1("Bit rate is greater than permitted in specified Level");

I have been making some progress (together with Arick, who I work with) on exporting to the camera.
Now we can go from FCP to MJPEG A Quicktime, from Quicktime to PCM .wav file.
Using mpeg2enc we can convert these to MPG and MP2 repspectively.
mplex converts these files to a mpeg program stream, then Project X converts PS to TS which actually plays back in the camera!
There are noticable audio and video hicups occuring on the camera (the ts plays fine in VLC), we think it might have to do with the video buffer size at this point.