Utility To Fix Corrupt MPG File

[kmp14]

I could swear I have seen references on here to a utility that can attempt to repair a corrupt MPG file. I have not been able to find it again.

Does anyone what I am talking about?

I am trying to get Firewire recording working, and most of the time it works great, but sometimes I get a file that won't play. It gets recorded, and even appears to get comskip processed, but the file won't play on SageTV client, HD200, or even WMP.

Anyway, if such a utility exists, I would like to have it take a crack at one of these files that wont play.

Thanks!

[evilpenguin]

The best thing out there is VideoRedo. It's not free, but its an incredibly handy tool.

[babgvant]

you can also try remuxing the file with tsmuxer (which is free)

[Rico66]

Does anybody know how and why .mpg files get corrupted? I had it twice recently that 3 hour long recordings (Sunday night football, recorded via my ATSC/OTA tuner) get corrupted. The files would start and play in Sage while the recording is still in progress, though none of the transport controls would work. But they won't play in Sage anymore once the recording was finished.

I was still able to play them using MPC, and I could even jump forward until a certain point, where apparently a corruption was happening. From that point on MPC would still play them, but without the ability to go forward/backward.
The audio was also slightly out of sync.
Is there a way to prevent this (e.g. some settings) during the recording to prevent this?

[babgvant]

you could try encoding the streams as transport streams (TS) instead of as a program stream (mpg) by editing the tuner settings in the sage.properties file, TS has more tolerance for error.

things to try:

- check tuner drivers, newest isn't always best (although it usually is)
- check HD controller drivers, if you're running in AHCI mode make sure you have the vendor specific drivers intalled. The MS ones work but performance isn't good.
- defrag the HD
- chkdsk the HD
- make sure your recording dir is excluded from AV scans
- make sure your recording dir is excluded from Windows Search indexing

[gplasky]

Are your recording drives formatted for 64k blocks? Is your hard drive going bad?

Gerry

[Rico66]

Originally Posted by babgvant

you could try encoding the streams as transport streams (TS) instead of as a program stream (mpg) by editing the tuner settings in the sage.properties file, TS has more tolerance for error.

things to try:

- check tuner drivers, newest isn't always best (although it usually is)
- check HD controller drivers, if you're running in AHCI mode make sure you have the vendor specific drivers intalled. The MS ones work but performance isn't good.
- defrag the HD
- chkdsk the HD
- make sure your recording dir is excluded from AV scans
- make sure your recording dir is excluded from Windows Search indexing

Thanks.
I'll definetly try using TS instead. My hd pvr recordings (which are h.264 TS) don't show any of these problems, which is also a reason why I believe it's not hard disk related. The hard disk is pretty new as well.

The tuner driver is an interesting question as the tuner (Saber DA-1N1-E)gets natively supported in Win 7, but the manufacturer only has an older version on their web site. I used the older driver previously on Vista (with Media Center and Sage), without having problems. So I might try that one as well.

[babgvant]

One more thing to try is replacing the coax to the tuner card, if it's not shielded correctly or kinked it could be the root cause.

[Rico66]

Originally Posted by babgvant

One more thing to try is replacing the coax to the tuner card, if it's not shielded correctly or kinked it could be the root cause.

That one is fine. Reception is fine overall.

[Rico66]

Also, one more comment about the SATA / AHCI driver. Based on what information are you basing the statement that the Windows inbox driver is worse than the manufacturer's driver?
At least in my case (Win7 x64, 780g based Gigabyte board) the inbox driver performs much better than an AMD driver that I tried. I installed AMD driver (version 1.2.0.125) that I downloaded from the Gigabyte web site, but it performs very erratic, e.g. the system hangs for almost a a minute after log-on with the hard disk LED being on all the time. I also got a 10 second interruption while listening to a song (?!), which I've never had before. So I'm back with the original driver, which works just fine.

[Comitizer]

Originally Posted by babgvant

you could try encoding the streams as transport streams (TS) instead of as a program stream (mpg) by editing the tuner settings in the sage.properties file, TS has more tolerance for error.

The original poster is recording with FireWire, I'm doing the same and every once in a while I have this issue. Can you change the encoding type for Firewire recordings? Perhaps this will help solve my problem.

[babgvant]

How are you capturing the FW recordings?

[Comitizer]

Originally Posted by babgvant

How are you capturing the FW recordings?

From my Motorola DCT6200 (I think that's the model) to a firewire port on my WHS. I'm using the drivers from FireSTB and SGraphRecorder is the capture device.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Comitizer

From my Motorola DCT6200 (I think that's the model) to a firewire port on my WHS. I'm using the drivers from FireSTB and SGraphRecorder is the capture device.

I think SGraphRecoder lets you provide a graph. The muxer in the graph determines the container type. If you're not using the sage muxer you could try it; by default it writes TS.

[nyplayer]

This file corruption simply occurs in fire-wire captures... It has nothing to do with defrag etc.. I have recorded to an empty fresh formatted drive and get corruption.

There are threads all over the place in the IEE capture thread. I have a total of 8 other tuners and never got a corrupted file until I started capturing fire-wire.... when capturing HD through fire-wire its hit and miss. I simply gave up on it until I get a HDPVR. I only capture the SD recordings through fire-wire using a different graph that demultiplexes and multiplexes.

So it is easy to say you never get corruption.... if you do not capture through fire-wire..

[cychou]

Same here for DVB-T capture in Australia. There are always some kind of errors in the capture recordings. It is just a matter of how bad it is. Most of the time, I can ignore it. Sometimes manual fixing using a tool can fix it all.

At times, it is just beyond repair .................

This was never a problem back in the days when I was using hardware MPEG2 encoder, but OTA signal handling is a different story.


http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...3&postcount=23

[gplasky]

There hasn't been much development but this tool should help clean up.

TSPE - Transport Stream Packet Editor

Gerry