Garbled video on 160GB drive

[tavideos]

I fixed this problem once before, but for the life of me I can't remeber how. After installing WD 160GB hard drive and moving my MSP8 avi files to the new drive, they become garbled. I'm pretty sure it has something to with drive larger than 120GB. My system is a XP sp1- pentium 4 2.53 with intel mb. The other hard is 120GB. There both set for ultra dma.

Thanks
Tim

[heinz-oz]

How are they "garbled"? How did you move them?

[tavideos]

How are they "garbled"? How did you move them?

A thousand differant color dots is all you see when played back. It's also that way in the picture for the icon in the folder.

Actually, I didn't move them, I reformated the primary 120GB drive and re-installed XP. The AVI files were already on the 160GB drive. Before when this happend, I installed the new 160GB drive and the AVI files appeared this way no matter if I captured to the drive or moved the AVI files from the 120GB drive by copy and paste. I was able to fix the problem, it was something simple, just can't remeber what. I've searched the net, but haven't found a solution. When I reinstalled XP, the garbled video re-appeared.

[tv_news_guy]

Did you just install this new drive or did you format it etc? If you formatted it.. under XP you should have had the option of making it accept the larger files. If it is a real slow drive, or if you had device conflicts, or if you have driver issues.. it could make the video sound garbled on playback. Slow and choppy.. kinda stuttery. Check your device manager and make sure all your hardware is playing nicey nice together.

Hope this helps

Bill tv_news_guy

Non-linear editing is half art/half brain damage

[heinz-oz]

That's a strange one, I have rebuilt my system several times and still have unfinished projects stored on one of my discs. Low priority stuff that I work on occasionally. Some of the clips were captured at least 3 rebuilts back. Never seen this kind of behaviour.

[troppo]

I recall there being two types of .avi file, AVI1 and AVI2 (sounds logical so far!) however, a limitation of AVI1 is it can't be bigger than 2GB. Maybe this is part of the problem?
It sounds to me though, when you reformatted your hard drive and reinstalled xp, you have lost the codec to that was used to encode the avi files. There are a whole bunch of different codecs that all encode to avi slightly differently. So if you encoded with codec 'a' and you no longer have codec 'a' on your system, your computer is trying to playback using codec 'b' and hence the crappy picture. Codec 'b' just doesn't know how to decode the avi information correctly.
Use the program GSpot, (do a search, it's free) and it will tell you what codec was used to encode the avi, and then see if you have it on your system!
Hope this is the answer for you, I know how frustrating these things can be!
Maybe XP SP2 will fix the problem?
Cheers.

[heinz-oz]

Now troppo just triggered something else. AVI is not a file format at all, it's just a container and could be anything. I simply asumed these files to be DV-AVI, captured from a digital camcorder.

First we have to find out what the source material of these , so called AVI's, really is.

Where did they come from?

@troppo,

you are right if you are referring to DV-AVI type 1 and type 2. They are both just copies of the data from the miniDV tape and are encoded with MS DV codec. The major difference between the two is that type1 is just one stream, video and audio combined, type 2 is audio and video in 2 separate streams. The relevant MS DV codec is contained in ULEAD editing suites.
With either type, there is no file size limit of 2 GB. Any file size limit is imposed by the OS and file system. XP with NTFS does not have any file size limitation. With FAT32 the file size limit is 4 GB.

[tavideos]

The AVI files are DV-AVI.

Here's the thing, I just assumed the video was garbled because it was garbled in the thumbnail, had my folder view set to thumbnail, but when opened, their ok. When this happened the first time, the video was garbled in the thumbnail view and also when opened in MSP8. I don't why it's like that in the thumbnail, but as long as it's ok in MSP8, I don't care.

Thank's for everyone's input.

Tim

[heinz-oz]

Glad you got this sorted

[troppo]

Likewise, it's always good when it just works!

@ Heinz-oz

I'm not sure about the avi 1 and 2 thing but I got the idea of the 2 GB limit from the FAQ of DVDx (a dvd to avi/mpeg converter):

Q. I have created an avi but nothing will load it, programs say it is corrupt, what do I do?

A. All i can suggest here is to try a program called Divfix. Using that you can strip the index and rebuild it. If that fails you will have to look at your codecs and possibly try re-installing them. Also if the AVI is larger than 2 gigabyte it will not work. DVDx makes version 1.0 AVIs which are limited to to 2 gigabyte so anything above that will also show as corrupt.

I read about this some more in some forums, and apparently a lot of newer media players can read avi 1 files that are larger than 2GB, but others freak out cause they are not expecting it to be larger than 2GB and don't know what to do with the extra info. I agree, it is a hangover from fat days.

[heinz-oz]

Likewise, it's always good when it just works!

@ Heinz-oz

I'm not sure about the avi 1 and 2 thing but I got the idea of the 2 GB limit from the FAQ of DVDx (a dvd to avi/mpeg converter):

Q. I have created an avi but nothing will load it, programs say it is corrupt, what do I do?

A. All i can suggest here is to try a program called Divfix. Using that you can strip the index and rebuild it. If that fails you will have to look at your codecs and possibly try re-installing them. Also if the AVI is larger than 2 gigabyte it will not work. DVDx makes version 1.0 AVIs which are limited to to 2 gigabyte so anything above that will also show as corrupt.

I read about this some more in some forums, and apparently a lot of newer media players can read avi 1 files that are larger than 2GB, but others freak out cause they are not expecting it to be larger than 2GB and don't know what to do with the extra info. I agree, it is a hangover from fat days.

I'm not sure on this but there is a limit to the size of each VOB file on a DVD. I thought that was one GB though. I think the confusion here stems from the fact that we are talking about a file converter. VS and MSP do not have an issue with this, heck, in the capture module of MSP 7.3 I can set a filesize limit of 4 GB if I don't want the captured DV-AVI clip to be bigger than that. Just yesterday I finished a project were the mpeg file was about 6 GB (to be burned to a DL DVD), it was just one file