MOD is a format containing MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio. The extension is rarely used, that is why it can be opened only with special programs. Also MOD files can be playback by DVD players. If you want to open it with a standard player, the easiest way is to convert the file to MPG. Usually the format is used by Panasonic and JVC for recording video, the data is saved to a hard disk or SD card.

SPHERE (SPeech HEader Resources) is a file format defined by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and is used with speech audio. SoX can read these files when they contain μ-law and PCM data. It will ignore any header information that says the data is compressed using shorten compression and will treat the data as either μ-law or PCM. This will allow SoX and the command line shorten program to be run together using pipes to encompasses the data and then pass the result to SoX for processing.