Can't pause/rewind/forward some files

Hi guys/gals.

Newbie here. I’ve searched the forum, but can’t find anything that matches my problem.

I recently purchased a WD TV live player together with a WD Elements HDD. I moved my movie collection on to the new drive.This movie collection is ALL .ts files that have been copied from my Humax HD recorder. I find that some files play fine, while others do not display programme length (it just says 00.00.00), and just keep playing. That is: The file plays at normal speed but I can’t pause/rewind or forward it. As said, all my files are .ts files that are TV recordings that were copied off the same HD recorder. Seeing some play fine and others don’t it seems unlikely that it would be an issue with the format?

Any thoughts on why some of them do and some don’t work properly?

The ones that don’t sound like they don’t have proper sequence headers in them, but as to why the same encoder would make some with proper headers and some without, I have no clue.

The same lack of trick mode funcionality (that’s what the video folks have called that… the ability to fast-forward, rewind, pause, resume – I don’t know why) has shown up in other file types, so it’s not limited to a specific file type, but rather limited to whether the original encoding of the file provides for it or not.

The two symptoms go hand in hand…   the lack of a Time Index, and an inability to FF/REW/Pause all indicate a file that wasn’t “Closed” properly.

I got this quite often if my MKV encoder craps out before the end of the file (which it used to do quite often until I got the kernel fixed.)   If I opened an MKV and saw that, I knew immediately that the file was bad.

Might not be your specific issue, just wanted to throw that possibility into the mixture…

Thanks for the input guys.

I should add that the offending files play fine in VLC on my mac (which doesn’t appear to show programme length for any file) . So, whatever information appears to be missing, doesn’t seem to be required for pausing etc.

This leads me to think that it should be possible to recode the offending files into another format which should hopefully make them playable/pausable on the WD TV?

Could this work? And if so: is there any preferred format or software (mac or pc)? I’m not that keen on recoding a bunch of files seeing I bought the WD TV to avoid just that, but if need be…

DanlelF:   Use HANDBRAKE, use the “High Profile” preset, change the OUTPUT format to MKV, and fire away.

Yes, if you’re re-encoding the files with a decent encoder, as Tony suggests, then all will be fixed.

If you simply re-muxed the audio and video streams into a new container, then you might still have the same issue… if it’s because no indices were written when the file (wasn’t) closed, then a re-mux should create new indices… if it’s because the stream doesn’t have valid sequence headers, then you’d just be re-muxing the same “broken” video stream into a new file and the new file won’t be any better.

So, if you’re curious, you could try to just re-mux a file, before you go to the time to reencode it… if the new file is still broken then it’s a sequence header issue (or something of that ilk) and you’ll have to reencode the bad ones, and if it plays fine then the files didn’t get properly indexed.

But going by what VLC can and can’t do isn’t always instructive… it will handle quite a few problems that are “unplayable” anywhere else.

And it IS a tipoff there is something wrong with the file if even VLC can’t display the length of it (it means it is improperly encoded, no question about it).