Playback out of order - scrambled

[wscrivens]

I've had this happen on one or two occasions in the recent past, and it has me baffled.

A one-hour show seems to record normally, and produces a 1.8 GB file, the same as other shows of the same length, but when I go to play it back, it shows up as 22 minutes long. When I play it back in GBPVR I get the beginning of the show and the end, with about a half-hour worth chopped out of the middle. I tried deleting all the COMSKIP files but that made no difference. When I play the file back in Windows Media Player, I get the beginning and the middle, but not the end!

I'm at my wits' end trying to figure out what has happened here. I don't know a lot about MPEG formatting, but I can envision that some internal pointers in hte file got mixed up - but I haven't found any kind of "repair" utility.

I downloaded Mpeg Parser for Windows, but it apparently choked on the file size - it read in some data then blew up. I got a copy of MediaInfo for the Mac, and here is the output it produced:

Code:

*** MediaInfo Mac // Plain text file report
2010-05-23 12:34:57 -0400
Information for File: The Mentalist_20100506_22002300.mpg

General / Container Stream # 1
    Total Video Streams for this File -> 1
    Total Audio Streams for this File -> 1
    Video Codecs Used -> MPEG-2 Video
    Audio Codecs Used -> MPEG-1 Audio layer 2
    File Format -> MPEG-PS
    Play Time -> 22mn 36s
    Total File Size -> 1.74 GiB
    Total Stream BitRate -> 11.0 Mbps
Video Stream # 1
    Codec (Human Name) -> MPEG Video
    Codec Profile -> Main@Main
    Frame Width -> 720 pixels
    Frame Height -> 480 pixels
    Frame Rate -> 29.970 fps
    Total Frames -> 40662
    Display Aspect Ratio -> 4:3
    Video Standard -> NTSC
    Scan Type -> Interlaced
    Scan Order -> TFF
    Colorimetry -> 4:2:0
    QF (like Gordian Knot) -> 1.019
    Codec Settings (Matrix) -> Default
    Video Stream Length -> 22mn 36s 755ms
    Video Stream BitRate -> 10.6 Mbps
    Video Stream BitRate (Nominal) -> 5 250 Kbps
    Video Stream BitRate Mode -> VBR
    Bit Depth -> 8 bits
    Video Stream Size -> 1.67 GiB (96%)
Audio Stream # 1
    Codec -> MPEG Audio
    Audio Stream Length -> 22mn 36s 945ms
    Audio Stream BitRate -> 224 Kbps
    Audio Stream BitRate Mode -> CBR
    Number of Audio Channels -> 2
    Sampling Rate -> 48.0 KHz
    Audio Stream Delay -> 234ms
    Audio Stream Size -> 36.2 MiB (2%)

Can anyone shed light on this - what happened, how I can repair it, or other utilities that might shed more light on the issue?

Walt

[gEd]

Perhaps it's the classic PVR 150 timestmap problem ?

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tips/TimeStampIssue

[wscrivens]

Thanks, gEd.
I already have the new driver (listed as beta in the linked page) but I did not have the registry changes, which I have just installed.
I'm about to experiment with the ReTime program.

Walt

[EDIT] - ReTime fixed up the file just fine! Thanks again :-)

Walt