HD video crashes my computer!

[Ludicrous of Boorg]

I've been occasionally lurking around here for awhile; but this is my first post here in quite some time, if ever.

I just purchased a Hauppauge HVR-950 to record HDTV. It's mostly working well, but I'm having a great deal of trouble with a test MPEG-2 I made of a 1080i TV program.

The original WinTV2000 app is able to show it; but I can't edit the video or make it smaller in that app. VirtualDubMod shows the upper-left corner of the video, 704x480 pixels of it, with some blockiness on the right and the bottom.

Every other program I've tried either shows a blank screen or crashes. These include:

Blank screen (something like 960x480, black, with 10s audio, and the clip is listed as ~3min when it's only 1min):
Windows Media Player
Media Player Classic
AviSynth using DirectShowSource
DVD2AVI (in MPEG2toVirtualDub; 100x100, this might be normal?)

Crashes:
DGIndex (warns about incomplete GOP frame first.)
VirtualDub-MPEG2
VirtualDub 1.8.5 with MPEG2 plugin
AviSynth using MPEG2toVirtualDub's script, as best I could make it work, with all VirtualDubs
pvastrumento

VLC player, 0.8.6i shows a blank screen before crashing.

I also made a test recording of a digital subchannel. This actually shows a blank screen on MPC, too; but the VirtualDubs and DGIndex work, and AviSynth works with DGIndex, showing 704x480x29.97FPS interlaced video (though it wrongly defaults to 60fps or so).

Can someone help me get the bigger video working? What am I missing?

Thanks!

[neuron2]

Post an unprocessed sample of your source stream.

[setarip_old]

@Ludicrous of Boorg

Try loading it into "MPEG2CUT2.exe" (different than "MPEG2CUT.exe"). If it displays your video correctly, you can use it to do some basic editing...

[Ludicrous of Boorg]

Here's an example, which looks to be 1080p video; maybe even 720p.

http://rapidshare.com/files/139866316/sunfunnies0824.mpg.html (160mb)

Sorry about the size; I haven't been able to get any shorter clips that fail this way, yet. Complete failure may be related to the size of the file.

I did get some examples of 720p and 1080p video while trying to get a shorter sample of video. These have an intermediate level of problems: DGIndex and the VirtualDubs still don't work; but DirectShow does (with AviSynth and VirtualDub together too). I wouldn't bother you about this type of video, except you appear to be the author of DGIndex. So here's a couple of 720p commercial pieces (end of one, beginning of another) in one small video:

http://rapidshare.com/files/139868451/dmcommercial.mpg.html (20mb)

[Ludicrous of Boorg]

@setarip,

Thank you! Mpeg2cut2 is the first piece of software outside of the original recorder that can see and process the files. Now to figure out what I can use it for...

Edit: I've figured it out! Mpeg2cut2 lets me cut off whatever extra stuff got added at the beginning, so everything works, including DGIndex!

The first example clip will now disappear, but the second will remain in case Neuron2 wants to work on making DGIndex work with really awful MPEG2 files.

:thanks: to all for your help! :)

[neuron2]

The first video you posted is 1280x720.

The problem is that there is one sequence at the start with 704x480. Most applications size their internal buffers based on the size of the video as seen in the first sequence. This leads to crashes for your stream.

Furthermore, in that first sequence there is a reserved value for the aspect_ratio_information (5). When I made a hack to fix the first issue, I found that DGIndex crashes due to using the reserved value. I fixed this simple thing but making a correct fix for the first problem is non-trivial.

Can you find out why there is this spurious sequence at the start of your stream?

I'll look at your second now. Cutting away the start didn't help with it?

[neuron2]

Looks like the same problem with the second stream.

I'll add this to my to-do list for DGMPEGDec.

[setarip_old]

@Ludicrous of BoorgThank you! Mpeg2cut2 is the first piece of software outside of the original recorder that can see and process the files.You're quite welcome! I'm glad to hear it worked for you ;>}

[Ludicrous of Boorg]

Can you find out why there is this spurious sequence at the start of your stream?
Beats me. That's the way it came out of WinTV2000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauppauge_Computer_Works#WinTV2000_and_related_software).


I'll look at your second now. Cutting away the start didn't help with it?Cutting away the start did fix it; I just wanted to leave a short example out there, in case you hadn't downloaded either yet.

Thank you for working on adapting your program to this messed-up format!