Got a great result from my crowd-sourcing last week, as I struggled with the XP version of Windows Movie Maker, and its inability to edit MPEG2 video files (that is, the format favoured by most of the new-generation hard drive cameras).

Reader Ross Brown pointed me to Converio, a piece of French shareware that converts MPEG2 clips to Movie Maker-friendly AVIs (and more besides).

As Ross warned, post-installation set-up required a series of back-and-fourth visits to SourceForge and similar sites to collect video, audo and effects codecs, and I had to make a couple of visits to Google Language Tools to decipher the Francophile menu labels. But in the end it functioned relatively simply and, as Ross said in his original email "works a treat".

Speaking of Google's translation engine - yes, sometimes it amuses with its inadvertantly hilarious translations, but it also frequently amazes me.

Try this. Go to the website of the French newspaper Le Monde. It's all in Frog, of course, but cut and paste its address (http://www.lemonde.fr/) into the "Translate a web page" dialogue on Language Tools, click Translate then, voila, you've got a workable English version of Le Monde's home page. Magic.

I pointed this trick out to a friend, who found it really useful for booking travel for a European jaunt. Nothing like a bit of Google auto-translation to access local language (and local price) versions of travel sites.