MPEG messed up!

[robbo2]

Need some help here people. I have an 81mb mpeg of a friends wedding and this worked fine and played the full 10 minutes without any problem. Yesterday, I tried to play this for the first time in about 3 months and something odd has happened to the file. Firstly, it only shows 1.5 minutes in the time display. Secondly, after this time is reached the picture freezes. If I try to advance to a period after the 1.5 minutes, it does jump to it, but then after a few seconds the file freezes again and the file player (Crystal) hangs.

Can anyone tell me if the file can be fixed and if so, how can I do it? It has real sentimental value and no, we can't get another copy!

Any help appreciated.

[txpharoah]

Is it on a bad spot on the HD? The file is corrupted, either because of the computer or because of some error in the MPEG itself.

[robbo2]

No - there's absolutely no problem with the HD. I guess the file has become corrupted in some way. Is there any way to fix it? As I said, the file is now only showing 1m.58s long - before it was 10m+ but the file is still 85mb in size! Any idea what's gone on here (there must have been some "little hands" at work - kid's eh!) and more importently, how I can get the file back to the way it was before?

[txpharoah]

Be sure to check the HD thoroughly with something like Norton Disk Doctor before making that judgment prematurely. HD conditions change daily.

Anyway, try MPEG Corrector, but I doubt it. May do more harm than good, so run it to make a new file, don't overwrite the old one.

Also, it may just be the viewing software. Try another one.

Try to open the file in TMPGenc and see if it can preview the video file. Maybe you can transcode it again. I've done that before.

Odd situation, corrupted header mostly I'm assuming. Damaged files are something I've not been able to figure out yet nor find facts on it.

Should be more ways to work on this, hopefully you'll get more posts too. In the meantime, try what I've suggested.

[robbo2]

Thanks txpharoah - I've checked the HD with NDD - no problems. I've now tried fixing the file with VCDGear and MPEG Corrector - no difference so I'll give TMPGenc a whirl. It really is most odd, almost like it's been broken into a number of individual segments. If I view it via ATI File viewer, I can jump to another part of the file, but it just keeps counting down from 1.58 to zero each time I do it - it then freezes at 0 but the sound then continues!

[txpharoah]

I hate the new ATI file viewer. Version 7.1 was the only good one. WMP8 and WMP9 have errors too, and is why I've still got WMP7. No errors.

Let me know if the TMPGenc works for you. I've lost files before from issues like this, but normally because the HD was too fragmented when I had dumped the file onto it.

[robbo2]

Cheers - did a defrag fix the error? How do I transcode the file in TMPGenc txpharoah?

[txpharoah]

Defrag did not help 99% of the time. But try it for that 1% that may work. Transcoding is the same as re-encodin the file. Again. Just make a new file with the original as the source. And put it on a new HD too.