I need a program or method to tell me the exact length of a video file, as precise as I can get it. Down to thousandths of a second if possible. All I have are players that will give me the seconds, but I need to match up audio to these videos and be more accurate than that.

I don't know if there is software to do that, but if there is, I'd love to check it out.

VirtualDub will probably do it. This is assuming you want a Windows application...

- Trevor

Don't most pro- and prosumer-level video editing packages do that?

They do, I'm sure. I was just hoping that there might be an alternate way to view this kind of info for files that might not be readable by certain programs. Premiere can't read MPEG2 files, I don't think.

This was part of my experiments with vide extraction on Tivo.

Which leads me to a question I haven't been able to get answered: for those of you who extract video from your Tivos, are the .ty files basically the bestthe videos get? Or they pretty much the exact copy of the file on Tivo? I just want to make sure there isn't anything I could do to get the video looking better before I delete the originals.

What I had been doing in the past is extracting the .ty with tytool, then processing it to a .m2v and .m2a. Make sure you have "Make .TXT Files" selected under the options menu. Then using DVD2AVI I "index" the m2v into a d2v. This is done by using the "Save Project" on the file menu. I then drag and drop the d2v and m2a into TMPGEnc. Then in the source selection you can set audio offset, this is where you go back to the TXT file that tytool created when processing the file. At the bottom you see an offset, ie -13ms. You set this in the source selection. This is more of a round about way, but it gets the audio in sync. Then there are many ways you can process your video. I actually have been stretching it from it's native 480x480 to 640x480 Divx files making sure to somehow deinterlace them.

I got this method from here. But now there are many other ways, and tools. I have only tried TyStudio once, but it worked great for me. There are also a bunch of tools on www.vcdhelp.com

I actually have been stretching it from it's native 480x480 to 640x480 Divx files

Is it ok that all the .ty files I have extracted are 352x480?

The resolution depends on the quality setting at which the programs were recorded.

That makes sense. Well, I was recording at "Best" quality, but it doesn't make sense to me why I would ever get that resolution.