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I was copying video files from my laptop hd to an external hd. Now, some, not all, of the files I have copied are choppy and fucked up. On BOTH hd's. I could maybe understand if it was only the files being played from the external, but it's both hd's and not all the files. I have no idea what's wrong. Anybody know where to start trying to fix this?

I was copying video files from my laptop hd to an external hd. Now, some, not all, of the files I have copied are choppy and fucked up. On BOTH hd's. I could maybe understand if it was only the files being played from the external, but it's both hd's and not all the files. I have no idea what's wrong. Anybody know where to start trying to fix this?

(post is archived)

[–] • 3 pts

Your laptop HDD filesystem might be corrupted and you copied the same corrupted files to the external one.

Try to check for your internal HDD integrity with a recovery app.

[–] • 0 pt

These files had never had any problems until I copied them over.

[–] • 0 pt

I've had some very large high-bitrate files that will play choppy on a laptop HDD because they're 5400RPM and they can barely get the data off and through the SATA port quick enough. Playing them across the mess that is USB just wasn't a thing that would work.

Also had files that were just encoded like shit. It's hard to tell what you get sometimes when you find them laying around on the Internet.

[–] • 1 pt

You should try MPV or VLC (they handle hardware decoding) and have a pretty good caching system.

[–] • 0 pt

Vlc is the only thing I've used for like, 13 years.

[–] • 0 pt

I use VLC. Even it has issues with some things I've acquired.

[–] • 1 pt

The files on the laptop hd played fine until I copied them to the external. now the files in both places are shit.

[–] • 0 pt

That's odd. I can't offer an explanation unless your drive is failing or highly fragmented.

[–] • 0 pt

Copy to another computer's hard drive and try to play there

[–] • 0 pt

about every file I acquire act this way...until I transcode it to the format my lame ass (because they refuse to allow anything possibly associated with piracy as a codec) Sony Bravia will play off a thumb drive...then they all work flawlessly

point being a high bitrate file plays like crap on a laptop and then add pulling it off an external drive? you're kidding, right?

[–] • 0 pt

Unless you have broken hardware copying files doesn't change even one bit.

[–] • 0 pt

external

Is it over USB 2?

[–] • 0 pt

I believe so. it's not in front of me atm.

[–] • 0 pt

There's your sole problem. USB 2.0 has a max throughput of 60 mBps and that's theoretical perfect condition.

[–] • 0 pt

So the damage is done?

[–] • 0 pt (edited )

  1. dont use a USB hub.

  2. increase the VLC file cache (buffer) setting.

  3. if it's a fat based file system on the hard drive is it almost full? if so, it might need to be defragmented.

  4. md5sum the two files to make sure that they are indeed the same to rule out very slim chance that it's a hardware corruption issue.

  5. if all of these don't help, you may want to try a faster spinning external hard drive or changing the interface that the hard drive is using if that's an option.

placing my money on #2 fixing it.

[–] • 0 pt

Perhaps there was a miner/malware on the external and hooking it up the your laptop now spread to there and it has your cpu/gpu doing laps so that they can't play the videos from either the internal or external drive smoothly with the miner dominating processing. Wouldn't hurt to check out your processes and cpu/gpu utilization for something with high usage that could 'lag' your video player.

[–] • 0 pt

If you are on Windows, check "Programs and Features" for your media player and make sure it wasn't installed (modified) recently by an update.

Having both the original and the copied files behave badly tells me that the files are not the problem.

[–] • 0 pt

Run a program called HDD Sentinel and it will read off the SMART data on your hard-drive and if there's any issue with it.

Or reboot your computer.

[–] [deleted] • 0 pt (edited )

Note that VLC 3.0.14 had a bug that looping videos would appear corrupted. The new 3.0.16 or previous versions should not have the issue.