Couple of Issues

[brushwood69]

Hi, I've reported this before but I had done some more diagnostics to get to the bottom of the issue.

Equipment I have
ELM wifi ODB dongle
iPhone 4s ios 7.1.1
full copy of trackaddict 3.0.2
PC laptop with Race Render 3

When I run a wifi transfer the video only shows 12 seconds of a 2minute piece when imported but plays all the video on the phone. Its the same in dashcommand which I tried and the video stops at the 12sec mark. Now I looked at the properties of the file and it says length 12s but when I play it in media player it shows the end time as 12s on the slider but continues to play the whole 2minutes (v.strange) So is the transfer setting false attributes? This 12s issues causes racerender to lockup?

Second issue is the app itself, I record a session which works but then you end the session and the app crashes back to the apple phone app list but going back into the app again to record a second session the ODB is not unavailable. If you turn airplane mode on then off and go back in again all is good so is the app crashing and leaving something running?

Help very much appreciated on this

Nathan

[Weston@HPTuners]

The file transfer process should not change the video or its attributes at all, so unless there was some unusual file corruption or truncation happening, the apparent 12 second length you're seeing is possibly the effect of something odd happening when the video was originally encoded, and/or the decoder just not being fully compatible with it... I do recall a small number of reports of this type of thing in the past, but the issue has apparently vanished with the more recent phone models and/or newer versions of iOS.

It would seem that the older Apple H.264 encoder didn't always get along with the Microsoft decoders (most specifically, those in Windows 7), and as it happens I've also seen much more clear cases where the Windows 7 H.264 encoder didn't get along with Apple decoders (and some others). Who's really at fault for the first case, I don't know, but the later was mostly a Microsoft problem (solved in Windows 8 & 10). Basically, there are a few different ways to effectively indicate the length of the media, and some older encoders might do it just one way (and may not set the others correctly), then some decoders would try to interpret it using a different method and get a bogus result. The newer stuff from both Apple and Microsoft does tend to be much more robust, and several problems have been fixed, for both encoding and decoding.

In this case, what I'd recommend is trying to open the video file with Apple's free QuickTime 7 Player, and then see what length it reports. In the past instances of this problem, it was able to get the correct full length, and then the user could opt to use the standard 32-bit version of RaceRender, which is able to utilize the QuickTime decoders (when they are properly installed). It does have logic to try to detect and adapt to this situation automatically, but you can also force it to use the QuickTime decoders instead of Microsoft by going to the "File" menu, selecting "Media Libraries", and un-checking the line for "Media Foundation". Anything you open after that point should try to use QuickTime instead... It's not quite as fast, but it has been known to work better for problematic media files like this case. Alternatively, if you get Microsoft's free upgrade to Windows 10, it contains much better media decoders and encoders for RaceRender to use, which may also solve the issue.

As for the app crashing after recording, I've not seen that happen, so I'll be checking the crash reports we get from Apple to see if I can find any data on it... It doesn't happen when I try to reproduce the problem using the details provided here, so there must be something else that's more unique to your case. That's what I'll need to figure out.