I am very inexperienced in video and I have never used the video functions of Lightroom before, but I have a short video clip taken on an iPhone in MOV format during a visit to Ireland.
I imported the clip into LR 4.1 and it shows up in the Library as advertised. The file will play the video, but there is no audio. The same file will play with its audio in Windows Media Player so the sound track is definitely there.
Lightroom's Help function doesn't help with any advice. Does anyone know how to get LR to play the sound track?

Robert
Sydney Nikonian

I may be mistaken, but I think I read somewhere that Lightroom relies on codecs installed in the operating system, while Media Player has a set of built-in codecs.

Background, skip if you’re not interested in what a codec is: “Codec” is actually a misnomer. It means coder – decoder. A codec supposedly (en)codes from one signal or storage format to another and decodes in the reverse direction. For instance, a codec may encode from PCM (pulse-coded modulation, the format used on CD disks) to MP3 (Motion Picture Experts Group, Layer 3) or WMA (Windows Media Audio) and back. In your case, what you only need is a “decoder” that decodes the audio track of the MOV file. In other words, you won’t need the encoding part of a true codec, because that part has been done by your camera.

If you use Explorer to navigate to folder containing your MOV file and you double-click its icon (or use the contextual menu to play it), what happens? Do you only see the video stream or both video and audio? If you only see the video, you may need to install a codec for the specific MOV file produced by the iPhone.

Note that MOV files are “container” files for video and audio. Different MOV files may contain video and audio encoded with different encoding algorithms. What this means is that your system may be able to play MOV files from one camera but not from another.

Regards, Antero

Hi Antero,

When I use Explorer to locate the MOV file and double click it plays in Windows Media Player with the audio. (OK - the video plays upside down in WMP because I must have been holding my iPhone upside down. Funnily enough, LR puts the video right way up but doesn't play the soundtrack).

So do you think its possible to find and download a codec that might fix this on Apple's web site?

Robert
Sydney Nikonian

I had a recent problem with LR4.1 on Windows 7x64 not playing the voice memos on photos, but it would play movie audio tracks. I never found the problem, and tried a lot of things including a remove/reinstall of Lightroom. What did fix it was a remove and reinstall of my sound drivers on the PC.

For what it is worth.

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