I have a Panasonic DVD recorder and regularly transfer files to my PC (via a DVD-RAM disk). But sometimes the disk develops a fault (I have gone through 4 Panasonic RAM disks in under a year). There is no clue as to when or where the corruption occurs on the RAM disk and indeed I have only discovered the fault by accident. What happens is the data gets corrupted for usually a few seconds but it can be just a few frames and I'd like to find a way of detecting this without watching all two hours of video on the disk. What would probably work is if I had a software tool that could take in a .VRO file (I think this is the same format as a .MPG file) and look for discontinuities in the timestamps. So if there is a frame missing or corrupted then the MPEG PTS/DTS timestamps will not increase in the way that would be expected. If this could be located, together with the frame number in the file where it happens, then this would be what I am after. One complication is that sometimes the files I transfer from the Panasonic DVD recorder have had sections chopped out using the "partial erase" feature of the DVD recorder. I do this because I do my fine editing on the PC but the very rough editing eg 8 hours down to 30 minutes on the DVD Recorder. This has the effect of causing a jump in the PTS/DTS timestamps, but once the jump has happened then everything happens as you would expect from there. Ideally this would be not reported as an error, but a second best approach would be for it to be logged also; it could be difficult to distinguish between corruptions and where the source had been through the "partial erase" process. If there are other tools that could find problems in the file in other ways, bearing in mind that it needs to be a quick and easy process not confused by the "partial erase" cuts on the disk, then they would be of interest too.
Normally VirtualDub-MPEG is used to convert mpeg to avi, but it does have an error mode where it will scan the input for errors ('Video' > 'Error Mode..'). I have no idea if it would detect the problems, but it's fast. The VRO file would simply be dragged onto the window. VirtualDub-MPEG2 http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/stable/
