[liquidcow]

Hello everyone. I have a bit of a strange problem here. A while ago I was running an mpg file on media player and suddenly an error message came up. Unfortunately for some reason I clicked ok on the message and didn't have time to read it, but I think it was something about there being an error with a plug-in and it would be disabled.

Anyway, since that, a lot of mpg files that I'll try to play won't run properly. What happens is that an mpg file that's about, say, 30 mins will be only around a minute according to the player (the exact time varies from file to file but remains consistent with individual files). If I skip around the video file I can get to different parts of the video, but the player (whatever player I choose to use, be it WMP, Winamp, DivX player, or whatever) still thinks the file is around a minute in total, so say I skip to halfway through the time bar, I might get to a point in the movie that's around halfway through, but the player will think there's only about 30 seconds left. Sometimes if I leave it playing, when it gets to the end the sound keeps going, then it'll skip back to where the time bar started and keep playing for another few seconds, and so on.

The problem isn't the files themselves, I've tried copying them onto other computers and they worked fine on there. I've tried downloading codecs to no avail. I've tried converting but on this computer of course even the video editing programs think the file is around a minute long and so they only convert the first minute or so. I could convert the files on a different computer but that doesn't get to the root of the problem.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

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You may be encountering a very common problem, that is many .mpg files are not properly joined. There are many "joiners" that just concatenate the files, where all the headers are still left in, not edited out as in a proper join. Short of editing the files so that they will be entire, and I've cerainly done that myself, there is little you can do but avoid sites where you find files like that. There is propably nothing wrong with your players.

[Tyger]

You may be encountering a very common problem, that is many .mpg files are not properly joined. There are many "joiners" that just concatenate the files, where all the headers are still left in, not edited out as in a proper join. Short of editing the files so that they will be entire, and I've cerainly done that myself, there is little you can do but avoid sites where you find files like that. There is propably nothing wrong with your players.

[liquidcow]

well, until there was some kind of problem, the files that were affected played fine, so it seems that something has happened to cause this problem. Also like I said, the files in question play fine on other computers so there's obviously nothing wrong with the actual data in the file, it's something causing them to be read incorrectly on my computer...

[Tyger]

Windows media player will normally handle those kind of files but most players can't. Quicktime will also cope with them. If WMP suddenly can't, then you're probably right about something being wrong with it. But I'll bet that if your try a properly joined file your WMP will be OK. You could run the system file checker and see if that fixes it. Unfortuanlely WMP is one of the balkier programs in Windows and is hard to fix and often gives problems.