MPEG2 examiner utility/PVR 250 problem

[MadMike]

I have finally got WInTV2000 stable enough to let me encode
my camcorder footage to MPEG2 for DVD burning. However, the
resultant file (5.6 GB) does not seem to be playable by anything. Use
any player (PowerDVD or Media player) and start the file playing
from any point and it bombs out after a couple of seconds.
If I use a MPEG2 editing program, I can move to any point within
it and see the footage playing, but after a few minutes of trying
to do anything to the file (clipping or replaying parts) the program
almost grinds to a halt with any action taking forever before it
finally dies.

Any ideas what the problem might be? Are there any utilities that
will examine an MPEG2 stream and report abnormalities?

Help please!


Thanks,

MadMike.

PC:
Athlon XP 2000 with an ASUS S7S333 and 512MB DDR 2100 RAM
Running Windows XP on a 40GB Maxtor 7200RPM hard drive with
a Dabs value 4200 Geforce 4 card, audigy I platinum and WINTV
PVR 250 card.

[robz]

It sounds to me like the file is just too big. (It is certainly too big to fit on 1 DVD-r/w anyway)

Try capturing to separate files no larger than 4 GB or 2 GB (if 4 GB still doesn't work) then put them back together in your authoring prog. (you can do this in Scenarist in a few ways)

Seamless cutting might take some experimenting. Do not cut exactly ON scene changes, but 1 'frame' after ... or before. (which might look less good if you rejoin the segments to become chapters because then a chapter would start with an 'orphan frame')

[have you tried capturing a short segment? to make sure it can be played? If not... there might be some thing wrong with your MPEG settings?]

[just occured to me... did you install Hauppauges software MPEG DEcoder?]

[Swan]

any player (PowerDVD or Media player)
I have noted that PowerDVD does not like Mpeg-2 files that are larger than 4 GB. My copy hangs if I try.
WinDVD plays them straight through, though.
If you open the file in Mediaplayer, what filters are used to play the file? If it's Cyberlink's (PowerDVD) then this is the reason why you can't play it properly, is my guess.
Have you tried M2 Edit Pro for editing? It works pretty good, even with large Mpeg-2 files. Womble Mpeg-VCR is not as good at it.

[gotaserena]

Here's TMPEG warning message when I try to create a DVD-compliant MPEG file greater than 4GB:

"The MPEG file you crate (sic) may be larger than 4GB (4096MB).
Software Player or Authoring software may not recognize this file properly.

To avoid this warning, the file needs to be smaller than 4070MB."

It's just too big. You can cut it up using the NanoPEG software which came with the card or else you will need to re-encode it using either:
1) TMPEG
2) The U-Lead DVD Factory software which came with the card.

I've found from experience that NanoPEG is unreliable -- keeps losing A/V synch, and that DVD Factory is very slow.

About the error in accessing frames I've found that the Win2000 software sometimes outputs defective streams. I haven't done any thorough tests, but so far I have had no problems opening the file with VirtualDubMPEG2. VDubMod should work the same way, just rename the file to .vob. I know there's little use for it if you want to encode to MPEG2 but can be seen as a last resort: assuming you have enough HD space you can always reencode the MPEG-2 file as a (near) lossless codec AVI (like HuffYUY or MJPEG) and then re-encode it as an MPEG-2 using the DVD Factory.