Cannot import some VOB/MPEG videos. X3 hangs.

[GT Bill]

Some background: I'm so new at this that I have yet to edit a video. I have over 25 years of videos that were made on VCR tapes. I used a Panasonic VCR to DVD recorder to transfer those tapes to DVDs. I changed the extension from VOB to MPEG. Most of them import into X3 just fine. However, some of the videos I want the most will make X3 not respond (hang).

Here is what happens: I use the "Insert Media File to Library" process. Normally, when I click on the video its name appears in the File Name box right away. When it is a video that is going to hang the program it takes a very long time to fill the File name box. Sometimes it hangs there. Once, I was able to get the video into X3 and it started but I couldn't move the scrubber and then it would hang the program.

The odd thing is that the video will play in Windows Media Player and work just fine. I don't think there is anything wrong with X3, I think it is the videos. Any ideas? Would I benefit from an upgrade to X4? Thanks.

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums,

I don't think that upgrading to VS X4 will solve this problem with the various MPEG-2 files. If you still had the VIDEO_TS folders on your drive you might try using the Insert Digital Media command. You could try placing the DVD in your drive, and using that to see if VS might be able to parse it better. However if there is some corruption to some of the files, this also may hang VS.

You could try to run the troublesome MPEG-2 files through Super, a free file conversion utility. Don't change the format, just convert from MPEG-2 to MPEG-2. I've done this with MPEG-4 files I've had problems with, and it seemed to work.

Download SUPER here There's several adds all over the place on this website. I don't know why he makes it so difficult to get to the download link. You need to look for wording about Downloading Super. I think it's about 3 pages in, at the very bottom left.

super_conversion.png (85.58 KiB) Viewed 2309 times

[GT Bill]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the input. Super did not work for me. The video had no sound. I tried a couple of other converters and they converted the video but the quality was terrible. I tried the Insert Digital Media command but it just stopped the program. I guess the files are corrupted but what I don't understand is that they run fine with Windows Media Player. I did upgrade to X4 because of the BonusBucks20.

[coolspud]

Hi GT,

You might just have some dead wood files lying about which are confusing X3 from a previous crash.
I'd do a few things:

First make sure you're renaming the .VOB files as .MPG, not .MPEG - I found this can make a difference.
Make sure you're not importing the VOB file directly from the CD drive. Copy it to your PC first, then import it into X3.

Second, make sure your anti virus is up to date. Do a system scan to check you have no nasties.
Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware is a good one to download as an added check. Free from Downloads.com

If you use Windows XP, next thing would be to download C'Cleaner from Piriform (http://www.piriform.com/). It's a hard drive cleaner to get rid of your 'temporary' files which aren't all in c:\windows\temp. You could manually check and delete your main temp directories yourself manually by looking at:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME HERE\Local Settings\Temp
C:\windows\temp and C:\temp on your harddrive, by using explorer.

Last - do a defrag! A big 3Gb MPG video that's been fragmented by copying and writing data will chop up by a lot and take a uselessly looong time to load into X3, or any other player.

Hope it helps.

[GT Bill]

Coolspud,

Thanks. I'm doing all of those things. The problem is with the videos. The good news for me is that I found the old tapes and now I can re-copy them onto DVDs again. Maybe they'll come out better this time.