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Old 13th March 2010, 10:28   #1475  |  Link
Mosu
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Posts: 4,278
Quoting the documentation (both mkvextract and mkvpropedit know this parameter under different names but it seems I've only added it to mkvextract's man page):

Quote:
-p, --parse-mode mode
Sets the parse mode. The parameter 'mode' can either be 'fast' (which is also the default) or 'full'. The 'fast' mode does not parse the whole file but uses the meta seek elements for locating the required elements of a source file. In 99% of all cases this is enough. But for files that do not contain meta seek elements or which are damaged the user might have to se the 'full' parse mode. A full scan of a file can take a couple of minutes while a fast scan only takes seconds.
Getting a bit more technical:

The 'full' parse mode starts at the beginning of the file and finds all level 1 Matroska elements. These are e.g. 'meta seek', 'cues', 'chapters', 'track headers' and most important 'clusters'. For each level 1 element it reads the ID and the size but not necessarily its content -- only if it has to (for the track headers, the rest depends on the extraction mode/editing mode). However, reading all cluster IDs and sizes takes quite a lot of time as there are a lot of clusters over the whole file.

BTW: The programs will fall back to 'full' if no index is found and 'fast' mode is selected.
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Last edited by Mosu; 13th March 2010 at 10:33.
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