Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

This is not related to Puppy Linux, but maybe of interest for people who
encounter a similar issue with what CAN NOT BE and not finding an answer by
searching the internet.

Need to explain what happend:

I have an old DVD-Recorder with HDD (PVR). Since my Cable-TV provider stopped
delivering analogue TV signal, there is no use for this device any longer.
So i decided to remove the harddrive, put it into an external USB HDD case and
copy/convert the files from it.
But that does not work for all movies.

Opening directory VIDEO in ROX-Filer shows files with same names

Clicking the first of the double named files crashes rox with segfault.
All single named files can be played/copied/converted as regular .mpg files.

Also ls -la returns three pairs of files with identical names.

# ls -la /mnt/sdb1/VIDEO/
insgesamt 26660640
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root      32768 Dez 31  1979 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root      32768 Jan  1  1970 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  1992 Clip0.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4290772992 Dez 31  1979 Clip0.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4290772992 Dez 31  1979 Clip0.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2027 Clip10.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4290772992 Dez 31  1979 Clip10.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4290772992 Dez 31  1979 Clip10.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2016 Clip11.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  1980 Clip12.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2042 Clip13.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2107 Clip14.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2049 Clip15.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2107 Clip16.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4290772992 Dez 31  1979 Clip16.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4290772992 Dez 31  1979 Clip16.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  1988 Clip1.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2001 Clip2.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2005 Clip3.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2008 Clip4.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Dez 31  1979 Clip5.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1484390400 Dez 31  1979 Clip5.mpg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2012 Clip6.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2018 Clip7.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan  2  1980 Clip8.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    4194304 Jan 31  2024 Clip9.map
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root         40 Dez 31  1979 error.log
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      25992 Jan  1  1980 reclistbak.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      25992 Dez 31  1979 reclist.dat
# 

Kernel reports the FAT32 filesystem is damaged and mounted readonly.

So i copied the movies that were accessible to my PC and wanted to burn the
remaining movies to DVD.

I then reassembled the PVR, deleted the movies already copied to my PC and let
the PVR scan the harddrive. All looks good.
Writing to DVD worked for all but one movie - listed as #11 on the PVR content
menu.
When writing Title #1 and #17 the movies were split to two DVDs, for Title #11
two DVDs were requested too, but the PVR froze at the end of the first DVD.
Tried it several times with different DVDs (+RW/-RW) without success.

Watching this movie Title #11 on PVR still works.

Some searching the internet leads to no further information. All i can read is
that it is not possible to have two files with identical names in one directory
and it is also not possible to have files larger than 4GB on a fat32 filesystem.

Surprise, surprise...
After copying and deleting all wanted stuff from the harddrive i ran photorec
on this harddrive to find any .mpg file and it recovered loads of fragments of
movies already deleted long ago (125 files with mpg header were recovered).
AND it recovered some huge files.
From at least three of these bigger files i was able to put my movie Title #11
together again. I suspect photorec splits huge files by default into chunks of
2GB max. size.
In total these files are 5974MB. The uncut movie has a duration of 02:47:07

Happy End

(No, this is not an april fool)

[EDIT] changed misleading abbreviation to PVR

HerrBert wrote: ↑Fri Apr 01, 2022 8:11 pm

Some searching the internet leads to no further information. All i can read is
that it is not possible to have two files with identical names in one directory [...]

Sure it's possible, it's just enough to fiddle with the filenames using a hex editor.

Anyway, it's probably some PVR idiosyncrasy, here's something related: https://www.motherboardpoint.com/thread ... at.170250/.

Greetings!