Strange problem- file won't play to end

BillyBoy wrote on 4/30/2003, 10:59 AM
I asked about this about a week ago and nobody responded. Maybe I didn't explain it very well, so trying again. I reviewed some of my older videos (all MPEG-1, all created with earlier versions of Vegas) which were done over a year ago. About 10% of them for some odd reason refuse to play all the way through now or ever show the entire file if dropped on the timeline.

Example a 20 minute video only shows 2-3 minutes on Vegas timline and that's as far as it plays in Microsoft's Media player. I know and have CONFIRMED that the length of these videos is much longer, anywhere from 10 minutes, to some almost half an hour. This was confirmed by opening in VirtualDub which "sees" and plays the full length of each of these videos.

Question is... what is happening that both Vegas and Media Player only seem able to see and play jusr the beginning of these files?

My guess is somehow there is a bogus end-of-file marker, that hauls both Vegas and MediaPlayer, yet VirtualDub isn't bothered.

Can anyone suggest a fix, or maybe some tool that can give a more detailed view of the file header to see what's going on?

Now here is the really weird part. I've burned all these files to CD's and as part of my methods to ensure the burn was good I ALWAYS play the CD in full to avoid exactly this kind of problem. While I can see I forgot to test one or two, I can't accept that I missed over two dozen. So what I'm saying is once upon a time these files played fine in Media Player and from the CD's as well as from the bvackup copes on my hard drive and now for some odd reason they don't, but they all do play fine in VirtualDub. Tried on 4 different PC's so far, same problem.

This doesn't make any sense to me. :-(

Comments

philfort wrote on 4/30/2003, 11:08 AM
Maybe you have a different (buggy) MPEG1 codec on your machine now than when you originally created these files, and both Vegas and MS are using it, but VirtualDub uses its own or something?

Or maybe the codec used when you created these files was buggy, but able to "get past its own bugs" so they played correctly, but they don't play correctly with the new codec...

Just speculation that doesn't help much I guess...
bakerja wrote on 4/30/2003, 1:48 PM
I would suspect a recent media player update as the culprit.

JAB
kameronj wrote on 4/30/2003, 7:07 PM
That's what I'm thinking.
BillyBoy wrote on 4/30/2003, 10:29 PM
But... that doesn't explain why Vegas can't see the whole file and VirtualDub other editors can. For sure MediaPlayer is buggy, always was... but...

It kind of freaked me out. I was doing more house cleaning and going through the older videos I did a long time ago. Imagine, I see a 600,000K MPEG-1 file, open it, and it claims its only two minutes long.
philfort wrote on 4/30/2003, 10:37 PM
Is it possible Vegas and mediaplayer look for registered mpeg1 codecs on the system, but VirtualDub uses its own? Maybe you've got a bad mpeg1 codec installed?
ecoman wrote on 5/1/2003, 2:24 AM
I suggest it is the quality of the CD blank that shot craps in less than a year.....Try copying the the old CD files to your hard drive and then see if you can play the file...
mikkie wrote on 5/1/2003, 8:07 AM
FWIW, I've seen prob. with windows registry settings that associate a decoder with mpg files other then the one you might want to use - to check, with the file opened in media player, check the properties (in media player) to see which decoder it's using. I've had to manually unregister/register various decoder files etc. more then once.

As for a quicker fix, what happens if you do a direct stream copy using V/Dub? How about any of the mpg fixing prog. at digital-digest.com? If nothing else, they've got a couple that will give very detailed info on the headers etc. in your prob. files that might point to a solution.

BillyBoy wrote on 5/1/2003, 9:57 AM
What is curious is these files don't appear to be "broken" in any way. I've tried several "fix" utilities that are suppose to repair headers, the odd thing is none of them say anything is wrong. I also tried VirtualDub's 'scan video stream for errors' and doing same on six of the files ranging in size from 100K to 600K none of them show any errors at all, which I guess is my point. Only Vegas and Microsoft Media Player stumble.

So... I took these same six out of the odd twenty "problem" files and one at a time put them on the Vegas timeline, then zoomed way in on the timeline. Sure enough, when you do that each of these files ends with a "black" frame which would indicate something is wrong, but what and why doesn't any tool or VirtualDub stumble?

Checking the properties on Media Player it uses the junky Video-1 codec to open. If memory serves all these were created with the then included Lycos MPEG-1 encoder.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, since I can easily open these files and it seems make a copy in VirtualDub, so then opening in Vegas and snipping out a frame or two is no big deal, I'm just currious what happened and I'm still looking for some tool what would say something like frame such and such is bad because... Anyone know of any such goodie?

Erk wrote on 5/1/2003, 1:48 PM
Billyboy,

Just a thought: install one of your older Vegas version which might have done the encoding, and try to bring up one of these problem movies in that version. ?

G
GuruJerry wrote on 5/1/2003, 6:31 PM
This problem has also been driving me up the wall, but from what I've read on other boards it definately seems to be related to a codec that Sonic Foundry uses for MPEG files. I had ACID installed and that's what caused my problems. Here's a thread that should help you fix the problem

http://www.moviecodec.com/mb/topic.php?tid=102
BillyBoy wrote on 5/1/2003, 8:59 PM
Thanks GuruJerry!

Visited that site and downloaded DxMan which is a nice little tool. Haven't tried it on the system with the problem files yet but fired it up on this PC and for starters it shows mcdspmpeg.ax TWICE in the system 32 folder. Different versions. What's interesting is DxMan found a lot of other junk on this system, so I bet my other system which has tons of old junk on it has more. Too tired to start tonight, will see what happens tomorrow. I also have lots of other MPEG relics I've collected that others mentioned in that forum. So my guess now is somewhere between me rendering the files about a year or so ago, and trying to open them now, something got added. So just a wild guess so far, but it seems both Vegas and MediaPlayer use one or more of the files to try to decompress and stumbles while VirtualDub marches to its own drumber and doesn't, which would explain why it can see the whole file and the other two don't. Anyhow, thanks again for the heads up.