Repairing M2V files

March 10, 2005 12:34 PM

DVD ReEditing woes: The video stream from a DVD has bad metadata, and repairing the m2v file I've ripped hasn't worked.

I've tried ripping a DVD of a student film with both SmartRipper and DVD Decrypter while demultiplexing the video and audio streams into seperate files. I don't think the DVD includes proper metadata in the video stream, because when I try to open the m2v files created by either program there are a number of problems with the file. The timecode is wrong, the aspect ratio and framerate are incorrect, and the duration shows as zero frames.

The m2v file plays in a few of my players with an incorrect aspect ratio, but in the software I'm going to be editing with, it appears as a zero frame length movie file. It's supposed to be 29.97 fps, 16x9, and about 14 minutes long, but it shows up as 30 fps, and 00:00:00;00 long. I've tried using both ReStream and DVDPatcher to repair the header, but the files they have output have the same problems as the m2v I give them.

How can I get the file to play nicely in my timeline?

posted by too many notes to Technology (1 answer total)

Have you tried using ReStream to add or change the Sequence Display Extension (SDE) as well as the header? The SDE is basically the same info as the "header" metadata, except repeated throughout the file for each block of data. According to the MPEG-2 specs it's optional data that shouldn't be relied on, but some hardware players certainly do.

Just noticed ProjectX will read .m2v files. It may be able to make your file conform...

Failing that, can you use AVISynth to frameserve it to your app, or some other app and save it as an uncompressed / HuffyUV AVI? That way, you can define your own size & framerate in the .avs script.
posted by Pinback at 3:39 PM on March 10, 2005