Can moving pictures display entire movie time when there are 2 files? (1 Viewer)

[nzdreamer55]

Hello everyone. I am just getting use to moving pictures and have really loved it, but I noticed that when I have a movie which is composed of 2 files (say the shining cd1 and cd2) it plays the entire movie with out any problem, however I noticed when I was trying to fast froward to the bar scene the time bar on the bottom displayed the remaining time only in the first cd until it jumped to the second movie. Can I set it so that if I have a split movie that the time bar shows the entire time duration?

Thanks in advance.
Steve

 

[fforde]

This has been logged in our bug tracker for several years but it has not really gotten traction, only 7 votes for it (one of them mine!). It is something we want to take care of but I think it will either require a change to MediaPortal or maybe a custom player class used specifically for Moving Pictures. I will try to talk to a few MediaPortal folks to see if I can figure out what exactly is needed to fix this.

 

[raffe]

Oh, have not seen that before. After this thread I see it = 1 more vote.

 

[dir]

Split movies are a relic of the old days when guys would rip dvds to fit onto a single 700MB CD disc but wanted a higher resolution and/or better sound. So they'd rip it to fit 2 CDs.

CDs have been dead for a decade. DVDs have been dead for years. Yet some guys still insist on ripping movies into ~700MB slices.

In almost every case, the 2 pieces can be joined back together perfectly with the simplest of commands. I recently did this to my collection and joined together over 30 split movies, and they all play perfectly. You don't need to use fancy media utilities to join them back together - they tend to re-encode the entire movie and you lose visual quality that way.

The command is:

COPY /b "Movie CD1.avi"+"Movie CD2.avi" Movie.avi
del "Movie CD1.avi"
del "Movie CD2.avi"

Easy as that.

 

[mbuzina]

I would advise the following change of steps for the faint of heart / the ones who already lived through loosing data:

COPY /b "Movie CD1.avi"+"Movie CD2.avi" Movie.avi

Then TEST!

del "Movie CD1.avi"
del "Movie CD2.avi"

 

[RoChess]

The best way would be to properly mux the 2 files together.

This does not re-encode the video and audio streams either, so it works just as fast as your harddisk can copy the files over, usually in the 30MB/s+ range, so it's a few seconds for most media.

At least then the keyframe interleaving and headers match the media, so that tools that analyze the AVI header work correct.

AVI Mux GUI = AVI-Mux GUI

It also has support for 4GB+ AVI files, and can mux in SRT-text subtitle files if you want. You can also manipulate multiple audio tracks with it, either adding or removing the ones you do not want.

PS: The interleaving part is important if you still have non-PC systems to play the media on, such as a Western Digital media box, especially on OpenDML AVI format.