The VideoLAN Forums

Occasionally I encounter false alerts about broken AVI indexes, which are perfectly seekable even by VLC itself if the "broken AVI index" alert is simply ignored. Now, before switching to VLC Player I used Media Player Classic in combination with the K-Lite Codec Pack, which also rebuilds AVI indexes when encountering broken files. All of these files with false alerts in VLC are loaded as unbroken files in MPC so I'm pretty sure this is an issue with VLC itself since MPC doesn't treat them as broken and VLC doesn't have an issue seeking the files with their "broken" indexes.

To corroborate this further, additionally to these occasional alerts, VLC also recently went completely and inexplicably berserk rebuilding the index of every single AVI file I loaded, distorting the audio and video synchronization in the process. Since I at that time had VLC on automatic AVI repair mode, it took me a while to figure out what was going on, but after I had disabled it and then reenabled it in "ask" mode, VLC found no need anymore to rebuild the AVI indexes when the very same files were again loaded and the offset audio was now in perfect sync again.

Anyone experiencing the same or have an idea what might trigger these false alerts?

[Forgot to add version information: VLC 1.0.2, Windows Vista SP1]

I have exactly the same problem. I have about 20 episodes of a TV series, all made with Dr. Divx. For one file only, I get the error when I load it. If I tell it to go ahead and repair, it claims to be fixing the index but just ignoring the error allows the file to play normally. Let's hope for a bug fix!

Yeah, that's interesting... I also played a series of ~30 files yesterday, all encoded with the same utility and using the exact same parameters, and just one of them is reported as having a broken index. When I ignore this evidently false alert, I am of course able to seek and jump through that file as with all others without any problem...

Tool called Divfix++ complains something about those broken files?

Thanks for the tip, well, apparently that one particular file I've mentioned above in the series of ~30 files is indeed reported broken by Divfix++, however this is happening far too often, so my gut feeling is still that something isn't right. And either way, this doesn't explain the episode when all avi files were reported broken. I'll keep checking any other reportedly broken files with Divfix++ though...

Tool called Divfix++ complains something about those broken files?

BEWARE OF DIVFIX!!!

I read about it, tested it on a few avi files
it seemed fine, so went ahead and batch converted a whole load more + rashly deleted the originals.

in many cases it has ruined the divx / avi file. the "fixed" faile either plays back badly in slow motion or there's lots of other corruptions.

far safer to just toggle VLC to never ask !

Good to know, although if a file works as expected I don't even bother trying "fix" it. OTOH, this utility can still be of use for diagnostic purposes, but yeah, rebuilding lots of files with it obviously isn't a good idea...