Most cameras record in MPEG-4 format (an .MP4 or .MOV file) and one really annoying thing when videoblogging is that Windows Movie Maker can't open the source footage. One solution would be to use Quicktime Pro for basic editing or use it to convert the source footage to uncompressed AVI. This took up a lot of space on my computer and it took forever to convert the video clips back and forth.

So the solution is called mp4cam2avi. This program will convert MPEG-4 files to AVI files that Movie Maker can open. It can do batch operations and it doesn't re-encode the videos — You can use it to convert a dozen or so short videos in less than 30 seconds.