hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4428.txt

Episode: 4428
Title: HPR4428: Fixing AVI Indexes
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4428/hpr4428.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:35:33

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,428 for Wednesday 23 July 2025.
Today's show is entitled Fixing AVI Indexes.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is How to Fix Missing or Damage AVI Indexes.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q.
We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is Ahukah welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
and this one is coming from the Reserve Q.
So that means if you're hearing this, you should be recording a show.
Hacker Public Radio can only continue to exist as long as people provide shows and
it's up to all of us to do our part there.
So please record something, it's really easy.
If you need any additional information or motivation, there's probably eight or ten different
shows on the network already about how easy it is to record a show.
Check them out if you need more motivation.
So what I'm going to do on this particular episode is I'm going to tell you about something
that I found out and turned out to be kind of an interesting thing to find out.
It has to do with AVI files and indexes and stuff like that.
So the background of this is I like to download video files off of the internet.
For example, as you know I'm a huge Doctor Who fan.
Now I have a very long shelf full of blue rays that I've been collecting as they come
out of all of the series of Doctor Who.
So basically what they did is for the original Doctor Who run from 1963 up to 87 or 86 somewhere
around there as soon as 26 seasons.
So what they did is they did it year by year.
So what was the first season of William Hartnell?
That would be one and then the second season.
Well, they haven't done all of them yet, they've done many of them.
When it came to the new series that started in 2005, what they have been doing is, or at
least they have so far, is put out a complete collection for a particular Doctor.
So well, the first one, Christopher Eccleson only had one season, so that was simple.
But then I've got one the day the tenant years.
So that's like three and a half seasons depending on how you count it.
And then Matt Smith, complete Matt Smith collection, Peter Capaldi, Jody Whitaker, and so
far at least that's the way they've done it.
So instead of having to buy it one year at a time, you can get a complete Doctor.
And that's wonderful.
So I've got a lot of it.
I don't have all of it.
But the other thing is that there is other stuff that is related that isn't necessarily
on those Blu-ray collections.
And it could be something that was fan created or it could be something that the BBC did,
that they didn't include it in anything.
On the current season right now, for instance, they have something called Doctor Who Unleashed.
If you know where to look on the internet, you can find a lot of these other kinds of files.
Now, that's good as far as it goes, but I have run into an annoying problem.
And that is AVI files that have broken or missing AVI indexes.
Now, that can be a bit of a problem.
If you use VLC, which is my video player of choice, VLC will generally play them.
But what it does is you try to load the file and it says, no, I can't play this file
until I rebuild the index.
And it rebuilds the index.
But then you've got another problem.
First of all, it's not permanent.
It's all in RAM, so to speak.
And as soon as you close the file, it's all gone.
And the next time you open the file, it's going to have to rebuild the index again.
And the other thing that I've run into, and at least with VLC on these, is that it may
rebuild the index.
But if you try and jump ahead, search around to a particular part, it likely is not,
will just close the file altogether and leave you staring at a blank VLC screen.
So there's got to be a way to do this.
So I search searching.
And if you go online and do a search for fixing AVI indexes, what you'll get, at least
in your initial search results, are a lot of commercial solutions.
There are companies that make software that they would love to sell you.
One of them I ran into, and it looked like a very nice product.
They wanted $80 for a one-year license, and it's like, no, I'm not doing that.
I got to be able to do better.
And I thought, you know, there's got to be some good open source kinds of solutions for
this problem.
And it turns out there are.
And probably more than one, because I turned up at least several in what I've looked
at, like M&CODE, certainly is capable of fixing that.
But the one I found that just was simple and easy for me, uses FFMPEG.
Now I've put a link in the show notes to the place where I found this, and I've also
put the command itself in the show notes.
Basically, it is, I'll say it anyway, FFMPEGSpace-iSpaceInput.avi, in other words, put in the name
your file, space, dash C, space, copy, space, and then output avi, you know, what should
the output be.
Now when I do it, I'll just take the input name and put dash fixed at the end and make
that the output name.
It's very easy.
And I can get a new output file and literally it takes seconds on my computer.
Now, if someone is ever faced with this problem, here's a solution.
So this is a hookah for HackerPublicRadio, signing off and is always encouraging you to support
free software.
Bye-bye.
You have been listening to HackerPublicRadio, and HackerPublicRadio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, click on our contribute link to find out how
easy it leads.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by Anonsthost.com, the Internet Archive, and
our Sync.net.
On the Sadois stages, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International