QuickTime only plays first few minutes of .mpg

[James K Polk]

I started to notice recently when I download an .mpg and play it in Quicktime sometimes only 2 or 3 minutes will play. Some of these clips were fairly large 50-100mb. or more. The little playback pointer goes all the way across the timeline to the end as usual.

When I play the same file with VLC it plays the whole length perhaps 20 min. or more

In QuickTime, if I manipulate the pointer back and forth, stop and start sometimes I can get it to play beyond the point at which it stopped, but I can't find the trick to it on demand.

Anyone know why this happens, and if I can get QuickTime to play the whole file?


Thanks


Btw.... using Quicktime 6.5.1pro on osx 10.3.4

[Iceman67]

I have this experience as well. You CAN watch the video in Quicktime and on the Finder's browser function but you have to do the following: when the progress bar gets to the end and stops, click towards the beginning of the progress bar and you should be able to see the beginning of the next clip.

I DO NOT know why these videos are this way. My guess is some PC person encoded them incorrectly. I have tried to run these through VCDGEARX under the -fix function and -toast compitble mode which does indeed split them into individual mpgs but usually Quicktime or the Finder locks up when trying to play some of them.

Also, demuxing and remuxing doesn't seem to work either.

If anyone has any success, I'd like to hear of a solid solution as well.

[terryj]

This has been covered before...
usually the culprit is as you said...
some lamebrain on the PC
encoded the audio or the video
in an arcane codec and QT can only
decipher so much before it gets stuck,
or the files were segmented .mpgs
that were not joined in a proper
manner ( demuxing each one, stitching
the video and audio streams seperately
and respectively, then re-muxing the whole thing
as one piece).

The only way to fix it, to make it QT compliant,
is to use ffmpegx to demux the mpg back to its
seperate streams, stitch if necessary in QT, then export
out of QT as .mov and then onto Compressor, Toast 5/6,
or somthing else that will make in spec .mpgs.

I have posted numerous times on how to do this
with both troublesome .avis and mpgs,so fee
l
free to search the forum.

[sdm]

try this instead of exporting to quicktime and re-encoding (because you will lose quality)

download a program called Rosetta
use the 'fix' function on your broken mpeg.
If the mpeg was at sometime created by improperly joining smalller mpeg pieces, then 'Rosetta' will re-break them.
Next use 'mpgtxwrap' to rejoin the mpeg.
Your newly joined mpeg may very well play.

hope this helps. -- sdm

[havema-1]

Have you tried to fix the offending MPEG with MPEG Streamclip's Fix Timecode Breaks -command?

http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

MPEG Streamclip seems to join MPEG clips OK after its Fix Timecode Breaks command is used. And QuickTime can play those joined files, too (haven't yet tried what my DVD standalone thinks about them).

BTW, MPEG Streamclip is a _very_ nice utility for converting DVD/MPEG to .dv and other formats. It currently handles consumer-originated bottom field first MPEG with the wrong field dominance by default but the next version should fix this. In the meanwhile just save as .mov with a proper field dominance (i.e. deselect the default button for this) and re-export as .dv for use in iMovie etc. With later versions you should be able to export DVD/MPEG2 directly as .dv.