Huge recorded file

[FirstTeamOPS]

Evening all,

Got back to my computer after the Super Bowl and got low drive space on my secondary drive. It has 200K available. Looked at the recording file for the Super Bowl game and it was a whopping 135 GB. Never had a recording problem before but probably never recorded a program that long since the last Super Bowl.

I recorded a program on Saturday with the same 'high' quality profile and that file was 2.61 GB for 1 hour. So this recording should have been in the neighborhood of 13 GB. I can't open the file at all... Media Player Classic, GB-PVR, VideoReDo, and VLC won't do anything with the file. Fdisk reports no file system problems with the disk.

My Stats:
Windows 7
Hauppauge PVR-350 - 4.6b drivers from the website.
GB-PVR 1.4.7

Logs & a screen shot of the properties sheet are attached.

The only thing I can think of is Media Center. I don't have MC configured but I did launch it this afternoon and was doing some poking around the app. The only thing I can come up with is that may have caused a problem where MC didn't give up control of the TV card.

I do have the file if anyone has a idea how I can recover/test it but I probably won't keep it around long as the hard drive is now full.

So, can anyone tell me what happened? Is MC known to cause issues with the hardware and/or software set?

Thanks!

[wtg]

If you can, I'd run a scandisk on the drive. My guess is files are cross-linked or something and it's misreporting the filesize. That file is waaay too big.

As a point of reference, my HD recording captured by the HDHomeRun - a digital clear QAM capture as broadcast and much bigger than any analog SD capture will be - is only 28 GB from kickoff until 10:30pm.

[luttrell1962]

You can download mpegvalid4 to analyze the file (but it will take a long time). The recorder might have gotten stuck and recorded several extra hours. You may need to split the file. Search http://www.snapfiles.com media converters in the freeware section.

[FirstTeamOPS]

Thanks for the suggestions.

If you can, I'd run a scandisk on the drive. My guess is files are cross-linked or something and it's misreporting the filesize. That file is waaay too big.

That's my fault. That was my thought and I did run chkdsk. It didn't return any problems (I called it fdisk in my op. Been living in the Linux world for the last year and getting my commands screwed up :o ).

You can download mpegvalid4 to analyze the file (but it will take a long time). The recorder might have gotten stuck and recorded several extra hours. You may need to split the file. Search http://www.snapfiles.com media converters in the freeware section.

I will give that a try to see what happens. I did have the post padding set at 90 mins and I got back around 11:45 and it had stopped recording and comskip was trying to look at the file but its logs were empty because of being out of space.

[luttrell1962]

"Super" is supposed to pretty could but I have not tried it yet.

[FirstTeamOPS]

"Super" is supposed to pretty could but I have not tried it yet.

Didn't think of that one. I've used it before to convert video for my portable media player. I never know if I'm supposed to call it "Super" or "Super C"

[wtg]

Besides the ridiculous filesize, the fact that you can't open the file with VLC or VideoRedo just confirms it's not valid. If scandisk with all it's repair options set didn't find a file system problem, then I'd just delete it and be done.

Might try recording something else asap though a test to see if the problem repeats. Something went seriously wrong with that recording.

[FirstTeamOPS]

Besides the ridiculous filesize, the fact that you can't open the file with VLC or VideoRedo just confirms it's not valid. If scandisk with all it's repair options set didn't find a file system problem, then I'd just delete it and be done.

Might try recording something else asap though a test to see if the problem repeats. Something went seriously wrong with that recording.

I figured that if VLC couldn't open the file that is was done for. I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas if/how it could possibly be recovered. I'll throw it at Super to see what happens but I'm not expecting much.

Time to do some more digging on my system to see if I can replicate wtf happened.

Thanks all.

[FirstTeamOPS]

I am able to confirm that it was related to Media Center. More specifically Media Center Configuration. Starting MC by itself does not cause the problem but entering MC configuration does.

After entering MC config, recording with GB-PVR for 5 minutes yielded a file that was already larger than a normal 1 hour recording with GB-PVR.

The two ways I found to get it out of this 'state' is to restart the computer or restart the "Windows Media Center Receiver Service."

I see myself uninstalling all of Win 7's "Media Features" ... check that: done.