Convert JVC TOD to MPEG Video – tod2mpeg

If you own a JVC video recorder, you may have noticed that it stores it’s videos in TOD format. This is highly annoying as it’s not very useful if you want to view it on a simply device such as a Western Digital TV HD Media Player. The good news, is that there is a simple way to turn your TOD videos into MPEG videos using ffmpeg. It should also work for MOD files, but I haven’t testing it yet – please tell me if it works. I wrote a simple bash script to do this:

#!/bin/bash
video="$1"
newvideo="${video/%tod/mpg}"
ffmpeg -i "$1" -acodec copy -vcodec copy "$newvideo"
mv "$video" "$video.done"

You can download this script here –> tod2mpeg

Run this script by putting the TOD video filename after the script name.

Eg: tod2mpeg mod123.tod

It will use ffmpeg to convert to mpeg and once completed will append “.done” to the end of the TOD filename. You should be left with a mpeg file of the same name. eg. mod123.mpeg.

You will notice a whole bunch of messages coming out of ffmpeg. Just ignore these.

I’ve also written a little wrapper perl script to enable me to run tod2mpeg on multiple files. Download this here –> tod2mpeg-multi. You will need to make sure that you already have the tod2mpeg script in your path somewhere (eg. ~/bin/ or /usr/local/bin).

You will need to pass a list of TOD files into this script like this:

ls *.tod | tod2mpeg-multi