Difficulty playing large MPG file in Quicktime

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Difficulty playing large MPG file in Quicktime

I recently built a large (3 hour, 4.2GB) MPEG file with a Diamond PVR660 which plays fine on Windows Media Player but when I play it on my iMac (I bought the Apple MPEG-2 Playback Component) the file plays fine for a while then at 1h30m the image and sound stop (but the time index continues to advance in the player). About 2h32m the file begins to play again through to the end. Are there size limits on the MPEG-2 playback component? My intention is to use MPEG Streamclip to build a DV file for editing in iMovie. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks in advance for any assistance or sharing of similar experiences,

Scott

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.3), Quicktime 7.5 with MPEG-2 Playback

Posted on Jun 28, 2008 12:27 PM

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Answer 1

Jon Walker

Level 6

19,489 points

Jun 28, 2008 12:48 PM in response to sawozny

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

What file container are you using? Some are limited to 2 GBs and others to 4 GBs. Believe MPEG Streamclip will handle multiple files as a stream so you should be able to break the single file into smaller file segments and load them as a continuous stream for DV conversion as long as the file names are ordered alpha numerically.

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Answer 2

sawozny Author

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Jun 28, 2008 12:55 PM in response to Jon Walker

Apologies in advance for my ignorance, but I'm unclear on what you mean by "file container" in this context. I encoded the file on a PC, used and SMB share to transfer it to my iMac and it's now sitting in my Documents folder. Does that clarify?

I'm OK with splitting the file up and doing conversions that way. Any suggestions how to split an MPG into pieces? I was going to use iMovie to do it, but that's where my problems began here. 🙂

Scott

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Answer 3

Jon Walker

Level 6

19,489 points

Jun 28, 2008 1:32 PM in response to sawozny

Apologies in advance for my ignorance, but I'm unclear on what you mean by "file container" in this context.

The file container is the type of file into which you placed the MPEG-2 data. Elementary streams normally use an M2V file container whose audio resource reference points to a separate AIFF audio file. Multiplexed data (normally MPEG-2 video with MPEG-1 layer 1, 2, or 3 audio) would normally be contained in an MPEG file container which is usually limited to 4 GBs or 2 GBs depending on how the disk was formatted. On the other hand, multiplexed VOB files (usually MPEG-2 video with either AIFF or AC3 audio) are normally limited to 1 GB for DVD use but can be longer.

Any suggestions how to split an MPG into pieces?

Normally I would recommend splitting them at the source -- i.e. on the computer where you say they were created and were playback supported. Failing that and since you already have the MPEG-2 Playback component, I would probably see if I could segment them in MPEG Streamclip.

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Answer 4

sawozny Author

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Jun 28, 2008 1:51 PM in response to Jon Walker

Well, I'm not sure how to determine the container type from the PVR's software, but since all 4GB+ played in Windows Media Player I have to assume it was a container that was big enough. In the meantime I used Streamclip to convert the MPG to a DV and the whole file encoded OK. I think this is odd because it looks like Streamclip uses the MPEG-2 Playback component installed in Quicktime which didn't play the original MPG properly in Quicktime, but I have the complete DV file I needed now so I guess all's well that ends well. 🙂

Thanks for the advice,

Scott

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Answer 5

Jon Walker

Level 6

19,489 points

Jun 28, 2008 4:23 PM in response to sawozny

In the meantime I used Streamclip to convert the MPG to a DV and the whole file encoded OK. I think this is odd because it looks like Streamclip uses the MPEG-2 Playback component installed in Quicktime which didn't play the original MPG properly in Quicktime, but I have the complete DV file I needed now so I guess all's well that ends well.

More likely it is the way MPEG Streamclip handles the data -- i.e., more as a data stream or data pipeline. QT, on the other hand wants to "load" the entire MPEG-2 file. You may have noted that the QT Player takes quite a while "load" an MPEG-2 file before allowing you to play it -- even when they are much shorter than your "problem" file.

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