I've been using a Sony HDR-AZ1 for a few months now.

But Sony is a bit funny sometimes. I don't know the inner workings, but sometimes when I "format" the memory card, none of my computers can read from it. And the only way to get it working is to format it again and make sure that the memory card is readable, or reformat until it works.

Anyway so it so happens that I filmed a rather interesting incident last week, and I wanted to transfer this particular video to any computer. And of course I had forgotten to check to see if it worked this time. My Ubuntu computer didnt want to read it with some archaic error message. My Windows laptop (and my wife's, and my coworker's) silently ignored the memory card. And my old mac too. It seemed that this particular video clip was lost forever. I could play it back on my phone, but that's about it.

Then I decided to for-the-heck-of-it install Chakra. It's a shiny os. Easy to install and extremely responsive. That was painless to install and overwrite an old version of Mint 16 on some old disk partition.

Problem 1: Crashed when I opened Octopi the package manager. That was the video driver. I followed a guide on https://chakraos.org/wiki/index.php?..._Video-Drivers and then: no more crashes. Then to install exfat drivers.
Problem 2: It didnt show up when I searched for it in Octopi. This is because I was a noob and hadn't clicked the alien symbol that lets me search the Chakra Community Repo where all the homemade snacks is stashed away.
Problem 3: I tried installing fuse-exfat and exfat-extras (or something like that) and a popup asked me to type in root's password. My ordinary password didnt work so I went into a shell and got a root shell by typing 'sudo su'. Then I coulds set root's password with the old passwd command.
Problem 4: It still didn't work though. I'm going to assume that had to do with some non-ascii symbols used in my password. With only numbers and letters and "normal symbols" in the password, I could install the two packages. Poof, I could read from the memory card on a linux system and playback/copy all the files I wanted.

Thanks Microsoft and Sony for making a new file system / device that is only readable with Linux!