Making an MPEG\2 seekable?

[Cobra281]

so i downloaded an image of an SVCD, and in the folder "MPEG2", i simply copied the file AVSEQ01.MPG(movie file) to my hard drive, and it plays, but i cannot seek. how can i make it seekable? thanks in advance 8)

[DereX888]

I dont understand what you mean by "seekable"? Every video file played on a PC or a standalone player can be fast forwarded or rewound (fast backward), with the exceptions of sick format like realmedia or windowsmedia (but even those will fast forward or backward after some half-an-hour delay )
so in case you meant adding chapters to make it "seekable" that way, you have to use something slightly more advanced than nero to do so; i.e. VCDEasy can make chaptered disc image for you.

and why copy the mpeg file to your hdd? play it straight from the disc, almost every dvd playback software does play SVCDs correctly (i.e. PowerDVD that is attached to every cdrom/dvd-rom/writer in past 10 years does that, just dust off the disc

[Cobra281]

what i meant was, i cannot seek thru the movie in windows media player, as an MPEG. but when i play it as an actual SVCD with WinDVD, you can seek thru it.

[junkmalle]

what i meant was, i cannot seek thru the movie in windows media player, as an MPEG. but when i play it as an actual SVCD with WinDVD, you can seek thru it.

That's quite common. I don't know how to fix the file but you can use Media Player Classic instead. Or VideoLAN.

[DRP]

I have the same problem. You'll probably find that the MPEG-2 file was made with TMPGEnc 2.5 Plus. MPEG-2's made with that version are not fully 100% spec. compliant as I understand it. There's something non-standard about them and the end result is that players like Media Player Classic & (I presume) WMP can't seek them using their own built in MPEG-2 decoders (which are designed only for 100% compliant files). The MPEG-2 decoder supplied with PowerDVD however is a little less rigid and will seek them just fine. In MPC you can switch off the built in decoder and instruct the player to use the one from PowerDVD instead by this has the even less desireable effect of delaying initial start-up and play of the file by a small eternity.

I haven't yet found an acceptable solution to the issue.

[DRP]

If you demux/remux the file using Womble MPG-VCR, then that software corrects the non-standard error created by TMPGEnc Plus and thus the file becomes seekable with any player. Only problem with this is that it typically adds something like 10-15MB of padding to the overall filesize of the MPEG, so if, like me, you tend to size things to fit a disc as close as possible then this will make the file too big to burn.

[junkmalle]

I just tried TMPEGEnc Plus's (version 2.521.58.169) Simple DeMultiplex and Simple Multiplex utilities on an old SVCD MPEG file that wouldn't seek in Media Player. The new file seeked properly. It was actually a little bit smaller than the original. Thanks for the suggestion DRP!

[DRP]

On downloaded MPEGs you will find that the demux/remux thing will generally fix a whole lot of problems as well as reducing the filesize to boot. In between you can also use MPEG Sequence Maker on the ES to correct wrong display aspect ratios as well. Like those NTSC 352x240 videos that display at that AR (1.467:1) instead of at 4:3 like they're supposed to.

[DereX888]

there is some registry 'hack' to enable windows media players to startup playback of media files and seek through them immediately (without caching).
Thats a bug in windows media players not in the mpeg files being multiplexed "improperly". Even if the file is not multiplexed exactly up to the VCD, SVCD or DVD specs - what this has to do with playback on a computer? It should make playback trouble on a standalone players, but computers oughta play it no matter how bad multiplexing is. At worst the audio could go out of sync with video, but it still must be "seekable". I am sure your file is playable and seekable when using other software players, so obviously its not the problem with file itself, but with this particular player - WMP.
Send your 'regards' to Microsoft and demand they fix that piece of sh*t windows media player.
Or switch to something less buggy. VLC seems like best software player for windowses.

[DRP]

The problem exists with MPC as well as WMP and I took it up with Gabest as to the reason. Together we narrowed it down to an issue with the way TMPGEnc makes its MPEG-2 files.

You can seek MPEG-2 files made by TMPGEnc for sure but the video either freezes or you just get a black screen while the audio seeks fine.

MPEG-2 made with CCE SP do not have this problem.