Still play without sound!

Question

I borrowed a friend's Sony videocamera to film a projekt for my thesis.
The videocamera produces MPEG 2 files, which cannot be played correctly on Quicktime (Snow leopard 10.6.8)
To solve this problem I bought apple's mpeg 2 component which promises to solve the problem but it doesn't work.
Mpegv2 videos still play without sound! Have I wasted my money?
Anyone with the same problem? any suggestions?
PS. I've tried all the 'classic' solutions: deleting and re-installing QT, using QT 7, repair permissions, but nothing seems to work!

Answer 1

I solved my problem with MPEG Streamclip. Although it dates from 2008, it does the job perfectly and for free :-). I could see the videos before (with sound) with VLC and Toast Video Player, but editing..well that's very tricky to do in Toast (with limited possibilities) and impossible in VLC and my project involves video editing. I have iMovie 09 and tried to import the original mpeg2 files, but it wouldn't recognize them.
To be automatically converted by iMovie, you must import the files directly from the camcoder. Once the files are moved to your hard drive, iMovie uses Finder-level routines to move the files into iMovie rather than the "Importer" module which handles many different QT non-editable camcorder formats. If you manually copied/moved the files to your hard drive, then you must manually convert the non-editable compression formats to editable formats.
The solutions you offer on QT MPEG2 Playback component can prove useful to me in the future, it seems though a bit too complicated and time consuming to go through all these conversions...
The demuxing/re-muxing work flows are very quick since the video is not converted—only re-wrapped. Unfortunately, these work flows are more for viewing the content than for preparing the video for editing. If you plan to do your editing in iMovie, then I would recommend converting the MPEG-2 video to AIC and the audio to Uncompressed. If editing in FCP, then you can convert the content to your preferred "project" compression format. If all you want to do in way of editing is to trim and/or merge files without titles, transitions, and such, then you can do that from within MPEG Streamclip. It also allows you to crop and/or center frame content and includes filters to modify contrast, brightness, saturation, change volume, and/or adding a text watermark if desired. Unfortunately, these routines can only be accessed as part of an export work flow.
I think it could be simpler and I still doubt that buying QT MPEG-2 Playback component was worth it :-(
Lion though seems to have solved this problem...but I am not quite ready to change OS yet..
As previously stated, the simpliest editing approach is to import/manage content directly from the camcorder to iMovie. With regard to the QT MPEG-2 Playback component, if you worked on any MPEG-2 content while testing MPEG Streamclip, then you are already using it. Otherwise you would have received an error message stating you needed to purchase/install the component. With regard to Lion, while QT X can play "muxed" MPEG-2/AC3 content in MPEG or MPG containers, it does not support the VOB file container. Further it does not support resource paired M2V/AIFF or M2V/AC3 non-paired elementary streams like QT 7 with the MPEG-2 component does. In short, while QT X.1 solves some MPEG-2 playback problems, it still can't do some things that the QT 7 Player can do and neither can edit GOP content natively as MPEG Streamclip can.