MicroMV was a videotape format introduced in 2001 by Sony. A cassette is physically smaller than a Digital8 or DV cassette. In fact, MicroMV is the smallest videotape format — 70% smaller than MiniDV or about the size of two quarters across. Each cassette can hold up to 60 minutes of video.

The MicroMV format does not use the highly popular DV format. Instead, it uses 12 Mbit/s MPEG-2 compression, like that used for DVDs and HDV. Footage recorded on MicroMV format cannot be directly edited with computer DV editing software. Sony supplies its own video editing software (for Windows PCs only).

MicroMV has not been a successful format. Currently, Sony is the only electronics manufacturer to sell MicroMV cameras. As of January 2006, Sony does not offer any new MicroMV camcorder models. The use of MPEG-2 produces effective lock-in to Sony's editing software, though third-party freeware has appeared that is capable of handling video capture from the camcorder and the data stream can be edited by anything capable of handling MPEG-2.

On Linux you may use GrabMV to capture micromv clips. The transport stream MPEG-2 clips can then be viewed by most popular video players, such as Totem (both Xine and gstreamer backends) or MPlayer. Recent development of the sequence editor in Blender allows to work with MPEG-2 TS transparently thanks to FFMPEG.

See also: camcorder, DVD

Video storage

MICROMV