Solution: Sound problems with the Canon FS100 in Windows

I recently purchased Canon’s entry-level digital SD camcorder – the FS100. The camera is excellent – well designed, well engineered, solid and produces good results (despite some nasty noise in low light). Its all round a joy to use. The software that’s bundled with the camera is a bit of a let down though, being clunky, slow and the complete opposite to the hardware itself.

One issue that especially frustrated me was audio. When playing the videos in the native player that came with the camera everything worked perfectly, but when playing videos in any other Windows application there was no audio.

Thankfully the excellent VLC Media Player (being the only application that could play the files successfully) saved the day – a quick look at VLCs codec information showed me I needed the A52 codec. A bit of digging told me that this codec was part of the AC3 filter pack.

So if you have a Canon camcorder and can’t hear audio in Windows, simply download the codec here, install it, and everything should work fine.