Problems in Virtual Dub

[Karl Childers]

Hey guys,
This is my first post. Here goes.
I’m capturing about a 50 min video with my Tivo through my AIW Radeon in Virtual Dub. (Video:Huffyuv-720x480 Audio: pcm-48khz, 16bit, stereo) I end with a roughly 22 gig avi that we’ll call “movie1.avi.” movie1.avi will play fairly well in WiMP, Powerdvd, etc.
I load movie1.avi in Vdub and cut out commercials. I select direct stream copy for video and direct stream copy (along with avi audio) for audio and save avi. I end up with a roughly 20 gig file we’ll call “movie2.avi”
There is something wrong with movie2.avi. In WiMP it will play awhile but then say “the file format is invalid.” In power dvd it will play awhile then stop. Anyway, my ultimate goal is to burn this file to dvd to play in my stand alone player, so I don’t worry all that much about WiMP or powerdvd anyway.
So I take movie2.avi and encode it with tmpg. No matter what the settings I end up with an Mpg where the audio stops playing about a quarter of the way through. The audio does resume after about 20 min, but picks up where it left off and is incredibly out of sync with the video. When the video part is over- the audio is still playing for 20 min to catch up. Why the 20 min gap in the audio? I know something is happening when I edit out the commercials in Vdub. Sorry to ramble on. Any ideas?
Karl

[cmacleo]

Which operating system and file system are you using (ie Windows XP and NTFS). Under and os if you use FAT32 file system an AVI file can only be up to 2 Gb in size. This is a limit of the file system. After 2Gb of play back the playback will fail.

Even using NTFS some programs cannot handle AVIs greater than 2Gb (a legacy thing largely). VirtualDub is generally fine and will happily create files or arbitrary size. There is an option in it where you can break up a file into chunks of a set size (normally a bit less than 2Gb). This option is segments AVIs.

I have a AVI I am currently playing with2.1Gb in size. Windows Media Player fails in playback toward the end with a 'Format Invalid' message. VirtualDub and TMPGEnc handle it fine.

TMPGEnc handles the larger files as long as you are using the correct VFAPI plugin (open DLM) for reading AVIs. You may need to change this plugins priority for it to be used by default.

[Karl Childers]

Thanks for the reply cmacleo. I'm using XP professional with NTFS. I did find a workaround for my problem. I took movie2.avi and opened it back up in Vdub. I saved as a .wav file. I then fired up TMPG and loaded movie2.avi for video and my newly created .wav for audio. Success!
It took about 10 min to extract that wav file though and I don't like the extra step. But considering encoding times it really isn't all that much.
Anyway can someone tell me why extracting the wav file solved my problem?

[liquid217]

it has something to do with opendml, the file system used in avi files. for some reason, virtualdub doesn't use it correctly, so you have to save to wav.