incorrect length in video (somebody help please)

[realmcmeal]

I've got a bunch of video files on m computer that are supposed to be long videos ranging from ten minutes to half an hour but all the players I have are reading them as 50 second or along those line.
How can this be fixed?

Also, I've got some files that when I try to open them in media players they shut down for no reason.
Why is this and how can it be fixed?

[zetter]

I've seen this happen with a number of files myself.

Although, if you actually play the video, the whole thing is there, it just looks like it's only 50 seconds.

[Firewalker]

I am not sure if you know how a CD Rom is made, but at the end of burning, it usually writes a TOC (table of content). This tells the computer how much space is on the CD, what's installed, etc... now for your videos, its somewhat the same... when the person compressed the video into AVI or MGP (MPEG), the program writes how long the video is... if when downloading the video, the TOC gets corrupted, it will miss report the length and it could also shut down media player because media player couldn't identify the codex. To see how long these movies are... look at the size... if they are anywhere from 15 megs to 45 megs.. the will be anywhere from 50 seconds to 5 minutes.... if they are 50 to 160 they can be from 10 minutes to 1 hour (I know there is a gap, I'm just giving an example).

Now to answer your question about can this be fixed... well there are two things that you might want to look into....

First, if you have an older version of Media Player, it may work better than a new version (and Vice versa)

Second, you may want to look for a better video player that might ignore the corrupted files and still play them. Sometimes quicktime works better than media player, and sometimes realplayer works better than quicktime... i'd say go to download.com and look for a MPG player that also plays AVI.

Third, I'd say look for another place to download you files from.... Kazza, bearshare, mynapster, etc.... just look around...

always check the size of the file your downloading... if it says its 50 megs on the site you are pulling from and you look on your hard drive and its 16 megs... that also explains why its only 50 seconds long... your not getting the whole movie