VideoReDo won't let me go any further...

[dadrab]

Here’s an interesting tidbit…

Over the holidays, there was a marathon being run on one of the cable stations of particular interest to me.

I found out the timing on said marathon and programmed my PVR-350 to record it. I made space on a drive and defragged it for the occasion. During the day, I checked on the progress several times. Everything appeared to be OK. During the night, recording stopped before the programmed stop time. I have no idea why. Plenty of HDD space.

So, I took what I had to work with, opened it up in VideoReDo to hack commercials and save out episodes. That phase was going pretty well until I got about a third of the way through the file. I could go no further.

In VideoReDo, I couldn’t watch anything past the point where it made me stop editing. Nor, could I watch it in VirtualDub MPEG, which kicked an error message saying my system ran out of memory.

I could, at least, watch the file in MPC, but couldn’t edit from there, so the file was of little use to me.

After fussing and cussing with it over the course of several days, I finally threw in the towel and blew out the file.

Now, having said all that, the file was huge – about 52 gigs. I figure that might be the cause of the problem. I have worked with really large files in VideoReDo before, but none quite that big.

Has anyone ever had anything similar happen to them? What were the circumstances?

Does anyone have any theories as to what might have gone awry?

Many thanks.

[jman98]

I've never worked with anything larger than about 8-9 GB in VideoReDo. It could be that VideoReDo is running out of memory too. Unfortunately you blew away the file, but I have a couple of suggestions.
1) It might have been possible to use some other program to have split the file into smaller chunks. You might be able to do this in AviSynth. Someone else might know another command line type program that can do this. You could then edit the chunks and assemble as necessary.
2) MPEGVCR might possibly have been able to edit it, but I don't know. I prefer to use MPEGVCR on standard definition video, but VideoReDo is what I used on high def captures.

I would guess that the file is simply too big for VideoReDo to handle.

Hindsight is 20/20 but I guess you should have waited for a periodic commercial break in the marathon and stopped recording and started a new job. I have the PVR-350 too and that's what I would have done rather than end up with one gigantic file to edit.

[dadrab]

Hindsight is 20/20 but I guess you should have waited for a periodic commercial break in the marathon and stopped recording and started a new job. I have the PVR-350 too and that's what I would have done rather than end up with one gigantic file to edit.

That thought had occurred to me as well. I'll plan a different strategy next time. I did try several programs to try to chop the file into more digestable bits, but none of them worked. I did not try MPEGVCR, though.

I have worked with a couple of files in VideoReDo as large as 25 GB. They seem to do fine.

Because of past experiences, it never dawned on me that my final file might be too big to handle. I've become pretty adept at hacking commercials and saving out episodes in that proggie, so I was more surprised than anything else when I couldn't make it happen.

All was not lost, though. I was able to work with some of the episodes in the huge file that I needed and they are safely tucked away as I build menus and such for the DVD set. As it happened, the second episode of the series was all I lacked to be able to build at least four DVDs in the set. That episode ran early, so I got it.

Also, as I mentioned in the original post, the recording shut itself down during the night of the first day of the marathon. As soon as I discovered the shutdown, I restarted and got several more hours of video. That turned out to be a 20+ GB file and I was able to work with that without a problem.

Thanks for the input.

[The_Doman]

The problem you encountered is similar to the Hauppauge PPVR150/500 timestamp issue

In the past i have encountered that issue also a couple of times my Hauppauge PVR150 cards.
Most of the time i was able to salvage/edit the file by demuxing it with ProjectX and skipping the corrupted parts.

Too bad you don't have the file anymore to try it out.

[jman98]

The problem you encountered is similar to the Hauppauge PPVR150/500 timestamp issue

While it's worth sharing this information (thanks for that), it may not be the same problem. The 250 and 350 use a completely different chip set from the 150/500 models. It may simply be that dadrab's file was OK but just too big for VideoReDo to handle.

[dadrab]

While it's worth sharing this information (thanks for that), it may not be the same problem. The 250 and 350 use a completely different chip set from the 150/500 models. It may simply be that dadrab's file was OK but just too big for VideoReDo to handle.

I also appreciate the suggestion.

My honest belief is that the file was just too damn big. And, I should have known better.

As I mentioned in the original post, I was able to at least watch the file in Media Player Classic, but I couldn't get any of my editing programs to touch it except VideoReDo, which would only allow me access to about a third of the total.

[LJB]

Would either TSSplitter or DVTool work to reduce the size of the file?

[dadrab]

Would either TSSplitter or DVTool work to reduce the size of the file?

I didn't try those two in particular, to be perfectly honest. I dinked around with the file for about a week, finally got miffed at the whole thing and scrapped it after getting what I could use. I figured I was reaching the point of diminishing returns. It was 50+ gigs of HDD space I could be using for something else.

[SHS]

LJB that make things even more bad.

Man that sound like you record min, min hours on emd holy cow your in for a rockee road dealing with that.

dadrab man you should have used a PVR app and not WinTV to do that
SageTV BeyondTV and GR-PVR would have been your best beat that way it would record in each episodes in it own file.

[dadrab]

dadrab man you should have used a PVR app and not WinTV to do that
SageTV BeyondTV and GR-PVR would have been your best beat that way it would record in each episodes in it own file.

8) Now you tell me...

I may just give that a try. Thanks.

There's plenty more stuff out there to record.

[tluxon]

I've had success using VideoRedo's "Trim and Copy Source File..." tool, which doesn't require opening up the file until you've cut it into smaller chunks. If you run into a similar scenario in the future you might want to give that a try (if you didn't already).