WMP reporting incorrect movie length

[Cleo]

WMP reports these movies as under 11 seconds if played off of the server but if you download the movie first WMP reports the correct length.

Anyone have any idea what is going on?

[Aspire]

This is completely pulled out of my ass, but perhaps something to do with the buffered time remaining and a calculation that it does to guestimate the length before the entire file is downloaded based on the speed and % currently finished d/ling.

[Cleo]

I actually don't know if this is an issue with just stuff that I've encoded or if it something common with WMP.

I've never had anything of mine declined for my movies being too short but one of Foxy's affiliates brought this up today after a reviewer said something to them. I'm wondering how many reviewers use WMP's info to check how long a movie is seeing as no one before this has ever said anything to me. I know when I'm doing reviews I just look at the movie's file size.

I'm not a Windows user so until today, after firing up XP in Parallels, I've never used WMP to check a movie's length.

[HC-Majick]

yep..this happens quite frequently. just browse thru The Green One's rejection thread... I've tried encoding and reencoding movies with several different programs and it still happens. they show up short first time thru some versions of WMP. I finally just started including an extra movie in my freesites.

[Fonz]

It's a common thing like HC-Majick already said. I hate downloading movies to my hard drive first to see what the correct length of the movie is...

[Cleo]

I just watch how long the movies play when doing reviews or if I'm in a hurry look at file size.

Anyway glad to hear it isn't something just with the mpegs that I encode.

[Maj. Stress]

I'm pretty sure I found the solution. I did some digging through some old threads and found this.
Followed the link and downloaded from the "mirror site" for the free version. When I converted an mpg it changed the fps from 23.98 to 29.97. Uploaded and tested and the file now shows 11 seconds instead of the 5 it was showing earlier.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by Maj. Stress

I converted an mpg it changed the fps from 23.98 to 29.97. Uploaded and tested and the file now shows 11 seconds instead of the 5 it was showing earlier.

I don't seem to be the only one with this issue but I would really like my vids to always show the correct length. I'll try changing the frame rate to that on future vids.

I started a thread asking about this on the Episode support board. I'm Terri over there and they are usually really good tracking down issues like this.

[JK]

I tried converting them to NTSC with TMPGEnc, and they do show the correct length in WMP now... but the videos have increased in size by 1.5megs, and are also choppy and sporadic - but only in WMP.

[Cleo]

Wmp seems to have some oddities unique to it.

Like the green bar down the side on the movies that I posted. This happens if I tell my encoder to maintain the aspect of the movie when I'm resizing it. After I have everything setup just the way I want it I then have to tell the encoder to allow the movie to distort. The movie stays just the way it was before I turned it off but the green bar isn't there. That gallery uses a new preset that I made and I forgot to turn off keep aspect after I setup the preset.

[Cleo]

Something else that I just became away of concerning movies.

The same movie looks a lot different from PC to PC. Looks like crap on their PC but looks ok on mine, WTF.
Screen grab on my PC
Screen grab on someone else's PC
Same movie and both are being played in WMP.

[Maj. Stress]

Could be a few things, monitor, monitor resolution, video card. I just tried that video in wmp. When it is on my "good" monitor it looks similar to the screen shot you have. When I move it to my smaller monitor, it looks more like the other example.

[papagmp]

This is from what little I've learned over the years.

The codex’s used for rendering and playback and the frame rate will all make a difference. Also note that PAL movies have a different inherent frame rate that NTSC (Never The Same Color) so a movie rendered in a PAL codex at the inherent frame rate of 25.000 frames per second may playback differently on a machine/codex using the NTSC playback rate of 29.970 frames per second.

Also, most of the better programs allow you to reduce the frame rate when rendering to get the file size down - playback in another program using a different codex may result in an incorrect playback time.

AVI files are even more non-standard that WMV and MPG

And I do as HC-Majick, I always add 2 extra videos to every video we render for our affiliates – twelve 12-second videos=144 seconds or maybe not…….

[papagmp]

Originally Posted by Maj. Stress

Could be a few things, monitor, monitor resolution, video card. I just tried that video in wmp. When it is on my "good" monitor it looks similar to the screen shot you have. When I move it to my smaller monitor, it looks more like the other example.

In addition to everything above, Codexes also make difference in mpg playback quality - make sure you have the most currenrt drives and software for the hardware installed in your machine.