How to tell if AVI will be Seekable in standalone DVD??

[LisaB]

I burned an AVI to disc, only to find that it was not seekable in the standalone (Philips DVP642) DVD player....neither fast-forward nor "jump to" feature would work. I ran the AVI through DivFix (rebuild index), and now it will work fine in the standalone.

The problem here is that there *were* no problems playing this AVI on the computer...so I had no way to *predict* whether it would be seekable on the standalone. This is frustrating. Is there any software out there that will check the index and let me know if I need to use DivFix? Is there any software player out there that will do a better job of imitating a standalone DVD player for testing purposes? Could it be that I have some kind of filter installed on my computer that is automatically "fixing" video streams? I'm just wondering why the AVI with an obviously bad index is playing and seekable on my PC...

[offline]

Check for keyframes (Virtualdub can do this) . I think you
need 1 every 3 seconds but due to the differing mp4 chipsets and
firmware - not to mention codecs - there is no guarantee
that it will work in every mp4 enabled standalone. Most
DVD players, of course, can't play avi at all.

[LisaB]

No, that cannot be it. Divfix made this AVI seekable in the standalone. Divfix cannot create keyframes, only re-encoding could do that.

There had to be something funky about index...it seemed to work okay on the PC but not the standalone...

[offline]

Divfix does not identify or fix AVI problems, it just makes
a corrupt AVI playable by rebuilding the index and furthur it does not do
as good a job as VirtualDub when doing this. Rebuilding the index
often fixes keyframe issues, so I would not dismiss my suggestion
as quiclky as that.

1st you find the exact problem with your avi - then you have a lead
in what might be the problem. With downloaded, network transfered files AVI damage is normal and it is just bad luck. When creating your own it is not.