I have 15-20 videos that are television recordings. All encoded with MPEG1 (.mpg extension). A year ago when I played them they worked fine. All of them. Since then, I've done lots of windows patches and moved to windows media player 9, upgraded divx, etc. Here's the current problem: When you play these movies, there's a little status bar that shows where it's at in the movie. The little status bar moves about 8 times too fast, reaches the end of the space it can move in, and the video stops prematurely with over 80% of the file left unplayed. Windows Media Player both stock version and version 9, DivX (purchased copy), and every other player I've tried exhibits the same behaviour on these files. This didn't used to happen, but it's happening on them now. I have tentatively concluded that my MPEG1 video codec is somehow wrong, but can't figure out how to replace it since it won't let me delete it in the Multimedia Properties portion of Windows. Any ideas from the especially geeky? Thanx in advance. Oh, incidentally, when the little progress bar in all these players reaches the end on these videos, the video frames STOP, but the audio CONTINUES to play through the end of the video. Weird, huh?
The Mpeg 1 Video decoder is Built into Media Player and comes as a Part of the windows opperateing System....What it sounds Like to me is that the Files are somehow Corrupted...why don"t you download this: http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/stable/VirtualDub-MPEG2.zip And load your Mpeg1 files into it and then see if it can Read the Whole file and if it can Playback the File properly, It will also tell you if there is something wrong with the file .......Cheers
Minion: I loaded up virtualdub as you suggested. I opened one of the video files I'm having problems with. Virtualdub exhibited exactly the same behaviour as all my other media files. It played the movie, however the status bar moved much faster than it should, and when the status bar reached the end, the video stopped, with most of the video left to play. I am convinced the video file itself is ok. These exact same files used to play just fine on my systems (I have three separate systems all exhibiting the exact same behaviour). I can put up several of these files for download if anyone is willing to check them out. Virtualdub showed 0 errors and 0 unreadable frames in the file.
One other note. If I move the position bar manually in any of my players, I can move to different potions of the video file - including the end. I simply can't play the file from beginning to end because the status bar moves too fast - I have to reposition the bar manually to see the different portions of the file - but I know the whole video is there.
Additional info: When I go to file/properties in Windows Media Player 9, it says the length of a 40 minute file is only 4 minutes 40 seconds. (4:40). This is the core of the problem - that length is wrong.
Found the solution here: http://www.buttspy.com/help/Wrong duration when playing back movie files - Message Board.htm Download this: http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/dxman.htm ...and remove the MPEG splitters (mpeg only not mpeg2) that don't use the quartz.dll. Deleting the file MCSPMPEG.AX (rename if it you're uncomfortable) works too.
