I made a short video on my Samsung camera and saved it as a .gif in iphoto. I sent it as an email attachment. The attachment arrived as a .wma file and it won't open (all this done on Apple) All I get is a black screen in Preview and I can't open it ....any ideas?

hi,

Well... iPhoto is for handling photos, not video. And .gif is not a video format so it is not surprising that your video didnt play.

You should use appropriate video editing software to edit and save your video. I'm not sure if iMovie is free, but there are loads of free video editing programs. Once you have finished editing you should export in a recognised video format such as: .mov or .wmv or .avi or Mpeg or Mp4.

QuicktimeH264 provides the best video quality vs small file size and is easy to attach to an email.

richardt1808,good answer,thanks for the tip on Quicktime H264

One point well worth knowing when dealing with video is the difference between

file (or container) format and video/audio codec

a file/container format is usually identified by the file extension (e.g. .avi, .mp4, .mov) and can contain video streams encoded with various video (and audio) codecs, e.g. divx, H264, MPEG-2 etc for video, mp3, AC3 for audio.

There are exceptions where container and codec are more closely related.

.wmv files usually use versions of the Microsoft codecs, while

.mpeg usually implies the MPEG-2 video codec (the 'official' DVD codec)

Quicktime usually describes the container format (.MOV), whereas H264 is the used video codec. .MP4 is very similar to Quicktime (and also a container format), and can contain video encoded with H264 as well.

GSpot is a handy tool that identifies the codecs used inside a specific video file: http://download.cnet.com/GSpot/3000-2248_4-10381198.html?tag=mncol

HTH

welo