You guys have made my day!

Renaming M2V to AVI.... very sneaky.  I will try this today when I get home from work.  One question... I remember there being M2V as well as aiff files in each "tape" directory.  Will renaming the large (I pressume video) files automatically link to the audio (aiff) files? or does that larger file already contain both audio and video?.   Regardless, If I can get the original files to play it would be a humongous accomplishment.  Thanks again, all!

So far as I can see, this "easy" method of just renaming the files to .AVI does not work.  Sounded so nice at the time, though.  Regardless, I got around it by using MPEG Streamclip (thank you, Kenton) and converting the clips I needed to Quicktime and Avid happily imported them.

The one problem I encountered was using this process with very large clips which caused the program (MPEG Streamclip ) to crash everytime.  Luckily, this did not prove to be problematic for my purpose.

Thanks all who helped me to circumbent this challenge!