MPEG problem

Hi all

I am in the process of transferring some old analogue VHS tapes to my pc running Vista with a view to re-editing them in "Windows Movie Maker". I am using a "One Touch Video Grabber" to do this. As I want to keep the quality as high as possible I have selected "DVD" from the list of formats available with this device. The files arrive OK into the chosen folder and appear as MPEG with the icon showing balloons with MPEG written in the centre.

So far so good. These files will play OK in "Windows Media Player" but are impossible to import into Movie Maker which displays a message to this effect.This makes things a bit difficult.

Vista normally shows avi/mpg/ etc files as a thumbnail frame of the film in question with the icon of the program that opens them in the bottom right hand corner.( eg a little yellow arrow in the case of Media Player or a red teddy bear in the case for IrfanView) But this does not happen with these MPEG files, they remain as the MPEG balloon icon. However, for some reason I have found that the icon "MPEG" will suddenly be displayed as normal and then the file CAN be imported to Movie Maker. Mostly they remain unchanged and cant be used. I have no idea what causes this.

If I set the Grabber to import AVI or WMV or WMA etc the files come over quite OK and display normally in Vista. (ie film frame thumbnail)

Anybody have any idea what might be going on here, and how I can remedy this?

Renaming the files has no effect. Playing them has no effect and resetting the opening program has no effect. (in fact the right click window on these files shows that they should open in Media Player-which they do) They simple do not show this from their icon.
My PC has 500 Go hard drive space and runs with a Intel Core Duo E4500 processor and has a NVidia Geforce 8600 GS graphics card with 1270 Mo. Th OS is Vista Premium.
Any help would be appreciated.

Penphill

The easiest is probably if you convert those files to .wmv. Use this program ( Format Factory - Free media file format converter ) which is very easy to use and does an excellent job in terms of quality. If you want to edit the videos and care about quality, I would not use WMM. The output quality of WMM is dismal. I use this program ( Lossless Video Editor, Splitter, Joiner for AVI,FLV,WMV,WMA,MP3,WAVE,ASF files ) that I bought for $19.95 (lifetime license). It does a superb job and the quality stays what it was. Try the 14 day trial, it will not disappoint you. Suggest though you read the documentation because there are some restrictions. E.g. you cannot mix apples and oranges.

Hi whs
Thanks for the reply and the link. I'll give it a try. The grabber will produce wmv files so I'll give that a go first. (Only got the thing yesterday) I also have a version of the Pinnacle movie creator but I'll have to load it up first.

I think I have traced the area of the problem I mentioned but dont know how to resolve it anyway. The folder containing the mpegs seems to "load" its contents as a grey bar which passes along the folder name space at the top of the window. I never noticed this before. With smaller film segments the icons seem change OK to normal and the grey bar moves faster - seems as though the files are "read" and recognised, but longer mpegs (20-30 Mo...which more the norm) remain the same and the grey bar, after starting off normally simply dashes to the end. Even if I recycle the window its the same. Also, if I change the icon size, the PC seems to read the files again , resizes the icons OK but still doesn't change them to the correct type, so I think it may be something connected with file size or else Vista cant deal with this type of thing.

Penphill

I don't think it is a filesize problem. I have videos of 250MBs (45 minutes) and more and they process perfectly - but they are all .wmv. I think you have a filetype problem. Remind you that native Vista cannot deal with .mpg2 or .mpg4 files because it is missing the codecs. And I do not really recommend to install a codec pack because that has other drawbacks and can mess up your system. Conversion is a much cleaner solution. And if the conversion program cannot deal with it, then the files are corrupted to start with.

Hi whs

Thank you for the advice. It did seem to be a file-type problem. I saw exactly the same difficulty (several examples actually) on another forum...ie MPEG files playing ok with media player but not importing or playing in Movie maker. I looked into the "tools" - "Options" - "Compatability" section of Movie Maker and de-clicked references to the MPEG family of files.
Namely

ROXIO MPEG2 demuxer (Yes-it said demuxer)
CYBERLINK MPEG Decoder
HT MPEG Video Decoder
CYBERLINK MPEG2 Splitter
(Although for some reason I left the CYBERLINK MPEG1 splitter box ticked)


In truth I don't really understand what I was doing, except I knew that it could be reversed. Since then all my grabbed MPEGS from the VHS tapes load, convert to the correct icons rapidly and import and read OK in both programs and I can edit and publish the films, (at least to the PC where they play ok) I havn't tried a DVD yet.
Problem seems to have been solved hopefully.

Penphill

Well, that's good. If you want to burn them to DVD, may I suggest you use this program: DVD Flick - it works really very well.