Video won't play

Rwoby

Guest

Hello

I have problems with a .mpg movie. If I start playing it from the beginning, it plays fine, but if I 'browse' to see other parts it will show the frame but stop playing. This happens with WMP and Realplayer, but not with Quicktime.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Regular
Rep: 6

Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,286

I presume the file is an mpeg-1 file (you can determine that with certainty with tools like videoinspector or avicodec). Freezing when jumping frames is often indicative of file corruption. An easy way to check is to feed the file into VirtualDub. You’ll probably get a popup like “Anachronistic or discontinuous timestamp found in video stream 0 at byte position xxxx, from yyyy to zzzz (may indicate improper join)".

Rwoby

Guest

Indeed it is a mpeg-1 file, but I checked with VirtualDub and it didn’t give any error message. I only did Open video file... , maybe I have to do something else!

And if the file IS corrupted, is there anything I can do? Thanks

Regular
Rep: 6

Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,286

The reason I wanted to have the file fed into VirtualDub was that it’s good at detecting if tiny chunks are missing or out of order in the middle of the file. It’s by no means the only way a file can be corrupt though. I can’t think of any other cause for the behavior you described though. The file may not be corrupt. It might have a non-standard internal structure (like GOP etc.). If you use newsgroups try asking in rec.video.desktop. A lot of the people there are expert and probably know more than I do.