[MPlayer-users] A mysterious one time glitch from a Digital Standard Def broadcast

[Carl Weidling]

Hello,

I've been recording episodes of the old Perry Mason TV series, broadcast in
standard definition digital TV.

I've been doing this on a Apple Mac-Mini using an Elgato 500 Eye TV digital
receiver and elgato software,
but, once I've got the file, I've been transferring it over to my Linux
machine to watch with Mplayer, and
sometimes to compress into mpeg4 format.

Well, a few days ago I got a file and mplayer couldn't handle it.  So far
it's only occurred once, but I
can't help but wonder what happened?  My first thought was that somehow, in
recording, the file got
corrupted, but the elgato software on the mac-mini plays it just fine.

When I try to play the file with mplayer (version 1.0rc1-3.4.6), I first get
the message:
MPlayer 1.0rc1-3.4.6 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz (Family: 15, Model: 4, Stepping: 9)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

Playing PerryMasonBlindMansBluff.mpg.
TS file format detected.
VIDEO MPEG2(pid=33) NO AUDIO!  NO SUBS (yet)!  PROGRAM N. 2


Then it sits there for awhile, apparently searching for something in the
file, and finally it says:

TS_PARSE: COULDN'T SYNC
MPEG: FATAL: EOF while searching for sequence header.
Video: Cannot read properties.
No stream found.


Exiting... (End of file)

So, apparently there's something corrupted in the header information (even
though, as I said, elgato can deal
with it.)

What I'm really wondering is if I can somehow patch up this file so  mplayer
will recognize it.  I did a hexdump of
the beginning of this file as well as some files that were 'good'
recordings, and about the only thing they all seemed
to have in common was that they began with 0000000.

Any suggestions or help would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Carl