asf error, virtualdub 1.3 can't open it. how to fix?

[gnznroses]

i've got a video file, with a wmv extension. it's an asf file apparently cause virtualdub gives me the msg about copyright blah blah blah and i hafta open it with virtualdub 1.3 like i do other asfs. i try to anyways. i open it and get an error:

ASF:illegal object fragment flags 0a in packet b00
paxket size: 1a5e, pp=12, send time: 0:00

i ran the file through asftools a few times, using various settings, trying to repair the file, but no dice. same error. the video plays fine however in media player and i opened it in ulead videostudio 10 just fine.

any ideas?

-edit-
actually, after running through asftools i think i get a different error, but i forget what it is. i can do it again tho if it'll help.

[redwudz]

Sure it's not a DRM protected WMV file? VDub is pretty limited on openings WMV or ASF files anyway. You can do a search for DRM, or try some different programs, but the odds are you may not be able to open it if it's encrypted that way.

[gnznroses]

i doubt it's encrypted. just some vid i downloaded from emule/shareaza.

[Ai Haibara]

WMV/WMA are technically the 'next generation' of ASF, so some tools may detect them as being some form of ASF. However, I'm not sure it's a good idea to treat them as ASF files, since there's probably been some advancements since Microsoft was using ASF.

Can you open the WMV as-is with regular video players, such as Media Player? Note, of course, that anything downloaded from P2P networks may be of questionable encoded quality to begin with.

[gnznroses]

yeah, i can play the file in media player or media player classic. i opened it ok in winamp as well.

aside from ways to possibly "fix" the file, if it's needed can anyone suggest another app similar to vdub? i got ulead video studio 10 and it's awful. all i wanna do is cut the first half or so of the video out and i can't seem to do it in ulead. thought about trying adobe premiere, but i dunno. i don't need a complex video composition program, just a simple cutter.

btw, i used #1 video converter to convert the file to mpg. it ended up 1.5 gb (origianl file is 300mb) and it alos (for some reason) downsized the video. it was like 30% smaller, dimensions-wise. so i deleted it.

[Ai Haibara]

I'm not sure about editors that can handle WMV. Maybe Windows Movie Maker, which I believe you should have under XP. Of course, if you can view it without any problems and it doesn't appear to have any DRM, you can also always convert it to AVI and then work with it in VirtualDub. (However, that IS re-encoding the video, so it will suffer an unavoidable drop in quality. Whether or not that's acceptable is your call. )

MPEG-1 will compress a video far less than, say, Microsoft's Windows Media formats (WMV/ASF) or MPEG-4 formats like DivX and XVid. I can't account for the frame-size drop, though.