Problems Storing Vidoes For Viewing on a MacBook Pro

I came across this question today:

"I bought a MacBook Pro a few days ago and am in the process of transferring photos and videos from my previous laptop (Dell Inspiron 1520) and I'm having such a hard time figuring out how to get my videos! These are videos that I took using my Sony Handycam and I don't want to edit them at all. I just want them stored on my computer to watch them and perhaps send them to other people. All the videos I've taken on my digital camera imported to iPhoto just fine, but no such luck with video taken on a camcorder. It starts to import them, then tells me they are not a supported format. If they have to go into iMovie instead of iPhoto that's fine, but can iMovie be used just for storing and viewing or only for creating movies? Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm very frustrated!"

Here's my advice for her:
Let me try to help.

While you view photos in iPhoto, they are actually stored on the hard drive. The same thing goes for videos- they will not actually be stored by iPhoto or iMovie. With this in mind, you'll want to save those movies somewhere easy to find. Some people just create a new folder on their desktop, others create a file in the Documents area of their hard drive. It's up to you where you'd like to save them.

As far as viewing them, iMovie can do this, but it is definitely more tailored towards editing. Most times you can just double click the mpg file itself, and have it open in QuickTime Player. If it doesn't work, chances are there is a compatibility issue- your Dell had the ability to decode the video, and your Mac does not.

There are several solutions to this problem:
If you purchase QuickTime Pro, it should play the files fine, using the MPEG-2 Playback Component.

Or, download a plug-in to make them play: Perian . -http://perian.org/#download

You could also pay a company to do a Video Transfer/Video Conversion -http://www.dvdyourmemories.com- to convert them over to DVD, which should play on any system, or to any other file format you need.

You should also be able to use iTunes -http://www.itunes.com- to organize your videos once you figure out if they're compatible with QuickTime.

Hope this helps!