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[MarkCoutinho]

I'm collecting video-clips these days - pretty frustrating business compared with the clear world of mp3's but, hey, why not give it a go.

One of the frustrations is that MC can not always recognize/read the dimensions and time of a videoclip. But if I play it in some other simple player like that one made by Microsoft I can read this dimensions-info in the properties of the clip.
So why can't MC? It's escpecially with wmv's and in half of the cases with mpg's. Most of the avi's are recognized as well as the major part of the divx's.

Thanks for anyone's help!

[Matt]

Can MC play the videos in question nicely?

What if you do "Library Tools > Update Library (from tags)" on the files?

If you have a file that's small enough to share, email it to yaobing at jriver dot com with a link to this thread.

Thanks.

[jmone]

Mark - I keep alot of video clips in MC and for the most part it should update the Dimension / Length field when the Thumbnail is made.  One issue is if you can not play your video with the current DirectShow filter settings you do not get these fields imported into MC.  For some reason(s) however you can get video files that import, thumbnail correctly but stubornly refuse to populate the Dimension / Length field.  Once you know they will play OK, try selecting them and doing a "Update Library from Tags" - this normally works but you may need to reboot first.

Matt - There as been on and off posts regarding this for a while and I've been scratching my head while it does not consistantly work.  Appart from not having the correct Filters for the file type, the only other thing I can think of is that MC/Thumb tries to grab the info from the file as it is being created in the watched directory and fails as the file is not yet fully available.  This may expain why it fails when copying vidoes over the network and even why sometime you get the TV Recoding files not being imported (but I am only guessing).

[MarkCoutinho]

Hi Matt,

Here are some more specific findings that I discovered today after your tip:
1) I did a total new import of all my video's and again just about half of them weren't 'dimensioned' or the time wasn't recognized
2) I tried the update library from tags with one 'not recognized' mpg and the dimensions and time were filled
3) when I tried to update a mpg that (apparantly) can't be played in MC (but can be played in Media Player Classic) the update failed, but, even worse and maybe an indication in why the majority of the rest of the files weren't filled during import: after this failure I couldn't update the mpg's (for instance clip ABCXY) anymore. But when I closed MC and reopened it and I tried to update ABCXY it was successful. So apparantly one failure-reading messes up recognising the rest of the files
4) if I have a failure update the filename of the song is reset in MC! So after that I have to do the 'fill properties from filename' again.

I hope you can do something with this information.

[MarkCoutinho]

Bump

Matt, do you find my findings useful? I'd say MC is doing something wrong in this particular area.
Thanks for your answer!

[Matt]

What type of video file are you analyzing?

In theory, a bad DirectShow filter can have global variables that could cause an issue like this.

However, we analyze videos in a different process just to avoid issues like that.

[Yaobing]

Mark,

What DirectShow filters are you using for your mpg files? If you have not specifically selected a video decoder, which one does DirectShow load? (Right-click while playing a file, and choose "DirectShow Filters" to see a list of filters loaded by DirectShow).

Failure to get dimension and duration during importing often is caused by video decoders that do not work well, or do not work well when loaded in a worker thread.

Yaobing

[c1c9k72]

I've had the same problem for a while, mostly with XVID videos.  Some of the XVID's don't show a duration or dimension, but others do.  The 'update library from tags' doesn't fill the ones which don't work, but it's never been a major concern since they still play.

Just wanted to let Mark know he's not the only one.