I and others are having sporadic but repeating problems with VMC recordings having incorrect durations. I will try to summarize as best I can what the behaviour is like here, and have included a link to the current thread in the "Vista Media Center - General" section: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/210597.aspx (Note: in the thread itself you'll see a link to forums at another website where a group of people are complaining about the exact same issue)
The issue itself:
Occasionaly but not on every recording, Vista Media Center will record a show and when you go back to play it, regardless of its filesize and actual duration, VMC will think the total duration of the show is dramatically less than it actually is. For instance, it often for whatever reason decides that the total time of the show is 5:00 minutes, 6:00 minutes or 7:00 minutes, even when the filesize and actual duration of the recording is a half hour or full hour. I have summarized/categorized our findings about this behaviour as follows:
PRIMARY SIDE EFFECTS OF THE ISSUE:
- FWD, RWD, SKIP and REPLY are all made essentially useless in a recording where this occurs - if you choose to use any of those remote keys, the show will react accordingly but by too large an amount. (pressing fwd will start fowarding but do a big skip before it does so, pressing skip will skip but by three times the normal amount of time, etc.)
- *IF* you have a recording where this problem has occurred *and* you play it back without ever touching any of the remote buttons mentioned previously, the show will play from beginning to end and you'll never even know there was a problem at all. Typically, all of us experiencing the issue only know we have a new recording with the problem when we go to skip the first commercial, then we typically have to restart the playback and just mute our way through the commercials and let it play out with no skipping.
COMMUNITY ANALYSIS AND NOTES SO FAR:
- Although the shows seem to most often show incorrect durations of 5,6 or 7 minutes, some have seen ones of 15 and I have personally had one show incorrectly report 25. One user using tools out there that look at the metadata in DVR-MS files has noted that the actual durations of the problem recordings is not really a even "minutes" number - they are often actually things like "5 minutes, 14 seconds", etc.
- There was much thought that this might be an issue with the "Cool & Quiet" feature of AMD X2 CPUs as the vast majority of users with the problem all use them, but there are now users in the threads reporting it with an AMD Athlon XP CPU and an Intel Quad-Core CPU.
- There does not seem to be any commonality to tuner or type of tuner. This is happening to user's recording OTA HDTV, Standard cable signal, and a variety of actual tuner cards.
- There does not seem to be any commonality to video card - users with the problem are split among Nvidia and ATI cards.
- There does not seem to be any commonality to DVD decoder - user with the problem are split among the built-in Microsoft decoder, Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra, and the NVidia decoder.
- The chance of this occuring to a recording by a user who has reported the issue seems to be all over the place. Some users have seen this a time or two and thats all, while others are far more frequent. (I for instance record around 6-7 scheduled shows every day with VMC and there is almost always at least 1 of those shows per day with the problem)
- The issue occurs on playback of a problem recording whether or not it has finished recording. (users with the problem sometimes start the playback of a recording only half done and it already has the current duration wrong and exhibits the behaviour)
- Although probably not a big enough set of users for a *definate* pattern, some of us are seeing this occur with certain shows each and every time they are recorded. For instance, I think there are now three of us who so far have had this occur on each of the "new" episodes of "Heroes" this season.
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I hope this is enough information to start with! :) Someone rightly noted in our current thread that this question belonged here in this group so we call all pursue some kind of answer on the issue with a better liklihood of someone from MS reading it.