How to fix video file size after aborting download

[jjbtnc]

Haven't got a clue where this post should go, and this might be a weird question but.....

was downloading a high def vid file with a download manager and then realised it was huge so stopped the download.

i noticed however that the 200mb that had downloaded was able to be played with VLC

thing is windows xp reports it as being 8gb when in fact it what i have downloaded is 200 mb - a minute or so i think.

I'd like to copy the file form the pc it's on to a laptop to see what it looks like on a high def tv BUT the wrong file size is stopping me!!!! I can't get it to copy to a usb drive or dvd even though it is REALLY 200 mb not 8gb!!


Any way i can fix the size issue so i can copy ot to a different pc? it's in the mkv format if that means anything.

[Baldrick]

I haven't seen any mkv fixers. Maybe you can try demux it with MKVExtractGUI and then back to a mkv with mkvtoolnix.

[guns1inger]

It's not a weird question. Many download managers and similar programs (torrent clients, for example) pre-allocate the space for a download to avoid running out of space before completion. You have a file that is mostly empty space, with a little bit of video in it. However you do not have a complete video file. VLC is designed to playback partial downloads, however I suspect you do not have enough real information in the file for most other tools to work with it.

You might be able to use VLCs streaming capabilities to put what video you do have into another container, but it is something I haven't tried, so you will have to research how it works.

[jjbtnc]

cheers guys - will look in to it

it could be quite handy that i know how much was 'really' downloaded - i'll report back!!

[jjbtnc]

Just to let peeps know

i was lucky in that the download manager gave the ACTUAL size of what i had downloaded - my download manager showed it as having downloaded 200mb while windows reported it as nearly 8gb.

knowing the correct size i used HJSplit to split the 'supposedly' 8gb file in to files of 200mb long. I kept the first part of the split file xxxxx.mkv.001 (hjsplit adds the 001 suffix) but renamed it back to xxxx.mkv which was 200mb long - this then plays in my vid player and is small enough to copy over to laptops etc.

Just a note - not sure if this would work with torrent downloads or other download managers with different settings. Download managers can be set to download different parts of a file at the same time so if you have downloaded 200mb it might not be in a continuous block of data, torrent also doesn't start at the beginning of a file and download it bit by bit in a row until it reaches the end of the file, it downloads bits of the file in various locations.

i was lucky that my download manager happened to have been set to not split the file in to sections to download at the same time, just download it as one chunk starting at the beginning.

Hope that makes sense - it does in my head, just not sure if i explained it properly!