Topfield files and skip forward and back.

[ploughguy]

There is a much earlier, unanswered post related to this question.
I have a topfield machine in the city, and an iMac in the country. There is no TV reception at the country digs, so we copy programs from the Topfield to a hard disk then replay them in the country on a Mac with VLC.

When we play the files with VLC, the progress bar shows 0.00/0.00/0.00. Most forward and back functions other than dragging the progress bar marker go back to the start of the program (presumably because dividing by zero minutes gives zero bytes into the file). In particular, the apple remote and iPhone VLC Remote both pretty much always go to the start of the file which upsets the missus because she cannot jump the ads, and therefore must also upset me.

I suspect that if I reprocessed the file files to pure mpeg (using projectX or VideoReDo) then it would all work. This processing takes an amazing amount of time, though, and I would rather not do it. VLC is very close to being the perfect solution, and it seems that it just not quite finished.
My question is - is this problem with the .rec files recognised as a bug or a feature, and is there any plan to fix it?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I think that those are a kind of .ts files, that don't have length.

[The DJ]

We don't have specifications for the headers of Topfield files. What is worse, is that every topfield device (series) uses different headers. Besides in general you cannot time seek in mpeg-ts files, without parsing the entire file beforehand and creating some kind of time index. This is because the times used by MPEG-TS files are allowed to be changed at any point (for instance when transition to a different program).