Software to Scan .ASF files swiftly, easily ?

[abrogard]

My IP camera monitoring software creates a 5Gigabyte .ASF file for 3 hours of camera time.

It doesn't allow me to scan this in the way we scan when movie editing - dragging the slider and seeing the movie slide past, stop where you like and it stops there......

What it does is allow speeding up the replay to as much as (it says) x 32 (in reality stops at x 16). This isn't good enough for me.

I've been unable to find any software that will do better. Sometimes they accept the file and freeze. Sometimes they accept the file and in fact only take up about 10 minutes worth of it - disregarding the rest.

Trying to find software that will convert these files to something like AVI that might be more useful I only ran up against the same problem.

Thinking 5Gigs might be the problem I searched for software to cut the files down but the cutter software I found had exactly the same problems.

Currently I'm trying to switch to ISPY but it just crashed with an unhandled exception error. Before I go back to it I thought I'd try this forum.....

[redwudz]

.asf files are a PITA to work with. MS has seen to that. I assume you've tried VLC player? I don't have any .asf files laying around, so not sure I can give you correct advice. You might try Any Video Converter and see if it can convert them. It handles quite a few formats. I use the Pro version.

You may be able to open them with VirtualDub. Maybe with this plugin: http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/~fcchandler/Plugins/WMV/

[mgh]

Maybe windows movie maker

[abrogard]

Thanks for the ideas, guys. VDub, with plugin, made a 13gigabyte file covering 9minutes from a 4Gig .ASF covering 3 hours.

I also have Magix movie maker. It made a 1 gig file covering about 10 minutes.

Windows Movie Maker did something similar.

I seem to have a weird kind of ASF file. Not corrupt, because my webcam manager software that makes it can also play it back, at various speeds, but weird, causing everything else that tries to play it to fail - and, here's a clue, perhaps, often to fail at around the 10 minute mark and yet still produce a file in that format (the format being produced) big enough to encompass hours of material.

I'm going googling around looking for asf file clues...

[El Heggunte]

...
I seem to have a weird kind of ASF file.

Thanks to Microsoft's infinite wisdom , it's very easy to generate ASF files without a proper index and/or with an insanely-huge overhead.

[abrogard]

How does my software manage to play the file it created I wonder, if other things can't play it. Must be it doesn't read something they do read, or somesuch, I guess.
Perhaps it needs the index rebuilt accurately. You don't happen to know how I could do that? Don't say 'Asftools' because it takes in the file and then tells you it has 10 minutes instead of three hours, again, like all the rest. Unless I didn't use Asftools correctly. I did a few things with it. I ran a 'missing chunks' or something like that and just finished up with two files: neither of which was much good.

[Ai Haibara]

There's also AsfBin, though that can be a little difficult to work with, as well. I don't use it much, myself, so I probably wouldn't be of much help.

[abrogard]

Yes, thanks for the input. I have AsfBin, it's a well spoken of prog, a little beauty, but it won't look at my file. It says it has critical information missing from the header. 'Critical' to what, I wonder? Every other prog can open the file even if they do all truncate it at the place Windows Media ASF Viewer finds a 'catastrophic failure'.

I've emailed the author of AsfBin, suggesting he might have his prog list the missing information in that error message. That'd be some kind of help.

I'm using a Hex editor trying to find bad bytes to explain the 'catastrophic failure' but so far I can't find anything that doesn't occur in many places in the file - therefore, presumably, quite valid bytes.

Got a line on the same software from a different author, too. This one might be the genuine author and what I've got might be a knock-off, and a faulty one, made by someone who only half understands what they're doing (someone like me maybe .

I'll try this new version and if it makes good files I'll junk the old, just keep a couple of the bad files for interest's sake, to work on when I've a mind or perhaps a flash of inspiration.

After all - I should try to keep my eye on the ball, something I rarely do - the objective is to create valid files from the camera that I can scan easily. And that's all. Not to become an ASF file guru.