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Over the weekend I bought one of those Flip Video Camcorder. I've been having so much fun with camera built into my laptop, and with what little clips I can record on my digital camera. I've always wanted a camcorder, since I moved away from home at 17 and left my mom and dad's big crazy VHS shoulder recorder behind. At $150 for an hour's capacity of 640X480 nearly NTSC quality video, the Flip Video is the right tool at the right price for farting around with video.

So far, I'm very impressed. The built in USB dongle makes getting at your media a snap, and although the bundled software tries to manage your movies for you, you can safely ignore it and move your data around via whatever tools your operating system provides.
And the video and sound quality is decidedly not bad. Better than most $300 digital still cameras, but not as good as a $700 digicam.

But here's where a strange quirks come. Because the camera uses a wacky, proprietary codec, (3vix) you're at the mercy of the codec's implementation. (And, reading between the lines on 3vix support forums, 3vix isn't supporting Flip Video-inspired questions.) Frankly, in OSX, the 3vix Codec doesn't play so hot with Quicktime, and requires you use the 3vix "Dvix Doctor II" and a couple of wacky AC3 audio codecs to turn the movies into Quicktime files before they'll place nice with the iLife apps. (And, for what it's worth, 3vix isn't supported without conversion on the PS3, either.)

On Vista and XP, the videos came off the drive and played just fine after I installed the 3vix Codec. On OSX 10.4, the videos rendered images but not sound without additional tweaking.
But, I'd still recommend the camera to anyone who'd like to dabble with video.

So far I've posted two videos I shot with the Flip.
This iMovie edited movie called Free Zoo Day and a Windows Movie Maker edited "Virtual View" of the view from my desk today as the ice comes off the lake. Don't compare the video qualities. It's not apples to apples. (The Zoo movie was uploaded as a much higher quality video.)

Edit: Oh! An important note: I forgot to mention that even with the Codex installed, It is my experience that movies will not render from iMovie 08. I had to use iMovie HD in order to get the Zoo movie to output a file.