Help! Time duration of movie differerent

[Movieman]

Just registered version 4 of the player and now a number of the trailers that I run in powerpoint stop after 5-7 seconds of the trailer starting.

When I play them directly in the player they run with no problems but I have noticed that the  duration counter in the player wrongly reflects the duration of the trailers. i.e 7 seconds instead of 120 seconds.  This has only happened after I uninstalled version 3 and reinstalled v4 and registered it.

Can anyone provide a work around for this problem.

[Vovs]

Most probably stream that you played has some problem. I mean bitrate from "Sequence header" not coincide with real bitrate. Real bitrate is less as well. In this case demuxer navigate by bitrate from "Sequence header" and can mistake.

We are trying to solve this problem.

[esslee]

Hello Elecard - Are you any nearer to solving this problem of duration time shown being shorter than the actual length of the clip? I specifically bought this player for playing .rec files from a PVR and it is quite annoying when a clip of, say, 1 hour duration only shows as 10 minutes since after the 10 minutes there is no way to fast forward as the buttons become greyed out.

[eugene]

Hi,
It seems it's neressary to write a few words about "duration problem"...
The Elecard Demultiplexer filter (part of the Player) is responsible for seeking and calculation of the clip duration.

The Demuptiplexer can utilize two algorithms to find duration.
1. Using PTS.
Each MPEG-2 file should have Presentational Time Stamps (PTSs) and the Demultiplexer uses these PTS to calculate the file duration. Unfortunately, some files, which were improperly encoded or merged from different files into a big one, have gaps in PTS (or haven't PTS at all!). Therefore it's impossible to use this method for such files.
2. Using bitrate.
This is very inaccurate method. I think you know that sometimes bitrate is defined roughly and approximately; so real and announced (written at sequence header) bitrate are very different.
 
And now about the issue.
When the Player opens a file, the Demuxer analyses this file. It compares PTSs values, frame rate, file size and bitrate. If the Demuxer finds that everything is OK it'll use PTS method for seeking. Otherwise, it has to use bitrate to calculate the duration. But! As I mentioned above, often wrong bitrate value is written in the file header. In general, if you capture a stream recorders keep old bitrate value in the file header and therefore Player shows wrong duration.

How to fix the issue? The best way is to write proper value in the file header but unfortunately sometimes it’s impossible. Often it’s helpful to switch the Demultiplexer into “Simple” mode. Open your file using the Player and click <CTRL>+<F>; you’ll see the “Current Graph” window. You should click right on the Demultiplexer image -> “property” -> “Settings”; click twice on “Init mode” -> check “Simple”; click “Apply” -> “OK”.