How to break the AVI limit

[drwho41963]

I tried converting a mpg file to avi and it only converts to a little over 4MB and then stops. I have the same problem when I try to capture to AVI. I read somewhere that windows has a limit on the size of avi files. Does anyone know how I can get around this. I need the avi file so I can use movieshop to edit the clip.

[Craig Tucker]

You need to use an operating system that supports the NTFS filestructure. Namely Windows XP, 2000, or NT. You would then have to convert your hard drive filestructure from fat32 to ntfs.

[shamelessbill]

Craig, This may be the wrong the wrong place to ask but how does one tell XP pro to convert file structure from fat32 ntfs and do you lose all existing files when this is done?
Bill

[MpegEncoder]

This becomes a very long story.

1) FAT32 has a 4 gig file size limit (for any file)

2) Type-1 DV files have a 4 gig file size limit (under any operating system). Type-2 DV removes this limitation.

3) A program called "convert" will convert a FAT32 system to NTFS (under XP), BUT is produces a very poor allocation size of 512 bytes per cluster. What you really want is 4096 bytes per cluster. That said, it's better to install XP fresh to get the correct allocation unit size.

Hope that helps.

[hwoodwar]

drwho41963:

In your original post you stated 4MB did you mean 4MB or 4gig?

[edsmith77]

TO Shamelessbill,
it is very simple. xp provides a program called convert.exe. just run that program and follow the directions provided by the program and you will not lose any data from your fat32 system.
I made the conversion to xp about 3 months ago. very slick, simple and painless for the most part. converting my disk from fat32 to ntfs was straight forward just follow the directions given from "convert.exe".
However, it is not totally necessary to go to NTFS depending upon your situation. Vdub will do multisegment captures which live within the file format framework and the nice part is that it frame serves those to tmpgenc as if it were one big file.
It all depends on what you are doing. If you have already made the switch to XP you should change to NTFS either with a fresh format or via convert.