Camcorders forum: IPansonic SDR-H100 that only provides MOD and MOI files

You have also identified that this is not an Apple Macintosh issue... behavior is similar with Windows.

Assuming you want to do stuff on the Mac:
iMovie 6.0.3 is woefully out of date. It may have been the first to deal with HDV format high definition video and possibly the last to deal with PPC CPUs in Macs. The current version of iMovie '11 is 10.x.x, I think. My iMac is 3 or 4 years old and it has iMovie 8.x.x. (I use FinalCut, but that's not the discussion.) Something is amiss because a MacBookPro should not have come with such an old app. It would be bundled with the current iMovie '11 that is in the current iLife application suite. In any case, the bundled app cannot deal with MOD or TOD files directly.

The MOD or TOD files need to be transcoded (converted) first. HandBrake ( www.handbrake.fr ) and MPEG Streamclip ( www.squared5.com ) are both good open source transcoders you can use to convert the MOD or TOD files to h.264 MOV or MP4 files that iMovie will deal with (even the old version). Lowest compression is best and will result in large file sizes. After the transcoding is done, quit the transcoder, launch iMovie and drag the converted video files to the iMovie sequence "storage" area or directly to the timeline and edit.

The MOD file is the actual video media file. The MOI file is a text index file that only the camcorder uses to keep track of what is on the camcorder's storage and useless for any computer's video editor.

Other useful utilities to have:
VLC Player (free to download/use; should be able to play the MOD and TOD files)
Flip4Mac (the free plug-in allows MPG, WMV, AVI and other "Windows" format media files to use QuickTime as the player)

Clarification item:
"MAC" in all caps is a network acronym for Media Access Control. "Mac" is short for Apple's Macintosh hardware and Operating System ("MacOS").

HandBrake, MPEG Streamclip and VLC Player have Windows versions (though unsure if they will run on the most current) to do the same thing for that platform.