I know this has been addressed before but was hoping to see if someone has a solution. I use WinTV PRV to record live tv. The files are saved as MPEG2 format. Before I purchased the WD Live Plus, I would burn the file to DVD and all was good. I thought I could eliminate the process of burning the DVD by using the WD Live.
Unforntunately not being able to fast forward through commercials or to skip through a portion of a program is a big deal. The fast forward feature does not work with these files, and skips back to a much earlier spot in the recording.
I have tried to record in higher quality, different formats… nothing works. Reformatting to another format seems to work, but the process takes just as long as burning a dvd, which is what I wanted to avoid.
Are there any quick and easy solutions to this seemingly common problem?
Still haven’t resolved the issue. I tried converting to another format. I tried resetting the unit to factory presets, which did seem to help temperarily. I’m open to any other suggestions.
Perhaps try different ripping software and/or different conversion software. I use DVDFab for ripping DVDs and I have used Total Video Converter to make mp4 (avc H264), mpeg2, and avi (H264) files. I can use fast forward/reverse with the original ripped DVD or with the converted files and it works correctly. I have also used DVDFab for converting to other formats.
I’ve have this issue on every MPEG file downloaded from one particular site. I can press scan at 2x, and 4x, but when I press 8x, the movie is over, or it starts at the beginning. This also occurs when scanning at 4x, and then pressing play. There are no other problems with other videos I get from other sites, or are there any problems if I play these files on my PC with Windows Media Player. I’m thinking of converting all these files to another format, but that would be rather time consuming.
I have the same issue, with 2 files in the directory. When I hit “FF”, it performs the same function as “Next”, ie, it jumps from one file to the next. Do you have a single file in the directory? If so, the “Next” file may be the same file you’re currently playing, so it jumps to the start of that file.
In my case, the files are 3 hours long (this happened last night when I was listening to Rigoletto), and trying to get back to where I was is a _major_ pain. These are .wma files, which don’t have indices, and include a set of headers at the start of the file, so I can understand that playing them off-speed is a little tricky, but mplayer does it without any problems (and can even jump backward).
On the theory that it might work if there was an index track, I tried converting to an audio-only avi ("ffmpeg -i src.wma -acodec copy dest.avi). Mplayer has no problem with the file, but the WD plus live won’t play it. To be fair to the WD, ffmpeg did _not_ create an avi file (it doesn’t start with “RIFF”, doesn’t include “auds” or “LIST” packets, etc). I also tried converting using mencoder (“mencoder src.wma -o $dest.avi -oac copy -vo null”), but mencoder doesn’t want to convert unless there’s a video track). There may be some way to take a black mpeg-2 video file and the wma file, and use those as a group for mencoder. I’ll let you know if I have any luck.
A possibly work-around in WD firmware to handle off-speed play for non-indexed files: First determine the bit-rate of the file (known soon after decode starts). When the user hits FF, seek forward about Nx that number of bits during each audio frame interval, read until re-synchronized with the packet structure, then play 500msec worth of contiguous audio packets; repeat every 500 msec. The user probably doesn’t care too much about audio during off-speed play, other than knowing the current location in the file, so the WD doesn’t need to prefetch the contents it seeks past. I’d suggest N be chosen so that FF will go from start to end of the file in one minute; in other words, make it proportional to the size of the file being decoded.
