[murbot]

I sent this MP4 movie to alcimedes yesterday, and he couldn't open it because, uh, apparently the public movie atom in it was bad.

Whatever the hell THAt means!



Anyone else ever seen this?

[Barto]

I've seen it before and was/am equally nonplussed.

[Kickaha]

Atoms are the pieces of QuickTime files that hold information.

A movie atom is one that holds movie information.

A public atom is one that is to be read by the player, and presented, as opposed to internal bookkeeping information.

Obviously, you had a bad public movie atom, duh.



Seriously, sounds like it simply got corrupted in transit. Try zipping it up or something and see if that fixes it.

[murbot]

Actually I did zip it, and it worked the second time.

Smartass. (thanks, though)



I didn't know the whole "atom" thing. I thought maybe it was one of those random funny things you see, like this one I got a long time ago:

edit: can't find the screenshot. It was like: "Can't open the file titswhoreslutsuckdickbanglesbiantittie.mov, because the file name was bad"

Yep, pretty bad name all right.

Hello...
I have the same problem... the "bad public movie atom"... and i read that you can "zip" the file and fix it that way.... but... i dont know how to zip the file,i have winzip and winrar installed on my pc. I try with right-clik and it dosent give me the option to save it as .zip file... only to save it as a quicktime movie (.mov)... i only need instructions on how do it.
Tks to all

[DMBand0026]

Try zipping the file with this. It's a freeware windows utility that apparently gets the job done pretty well. If it says you have a bad public movie atom than try re zipping it a few more times. If it still says that than I'm going to assume the problem is with the movie itself.

I tried to zip it and onzip it but nothing happened, do you know how can i solved this problem?

[Brad]

I'd like to clarify the solution mentioned above.

Zipping and unzipping an already-damaged file will NOT fix it. I've seen this "solution" posted in various other places online and I think it's a twisted misunderstanding of the posts here. That's just a bad idea. That approach will preserve the damage, not repair it.

The "bad public movie atom" message implies that the file has been damaged somehow. This is rare to happen and I've never actually seen it myself. I've even tried deliberately breaking an MP4 file in this manner to no avail. Although, I was able to break it enough to get QuickTime Player to give me the generic "Error Opening Movie The movie could not be opened." message.

Kickaha's idea above was that the file was damaged while transferring it from one computer to another. This seems to be a reasonable explanation.

By zipping the file before copying, you add an extra "layer" of checks that the file gets across intact. Yes, upon copying, the zip file itself could be damaged or terminated prematurely as well, but you'd get a more obvious error message to that matter when trying to unzip it at the destination.

There is a potential workaround if you are unable to procure the original, undamaged file: try playing the file with VLC instead of QuickTime Player. VLC has much looser error-handling and will attempt to play the file even if it is badly damaged.

I hope this helps.

One movie I've found with this error uses sowt 48000hz 1536 kb/s audio*, with avc1 352x198 25fps video. It plays fine in VLC. I used the vlc transcode wizard to convert to .mov (without recompressing), and it tried to connect to apple's server, but couldn't find the any software required to play it. Converting to to .mp4 (without recompressing) quicktime gave error -8971, Apple's site recommends updating to quicktime 7 for that error. Strangely, the file changed from 43 mb's to 7 mb's without any recompression.

*Wikipedia states that sowt is uncompressed AIFF in a different byte order.

I recompressed the audio and video to mpeg-4 and it finally plays in quicktime with no sound.

Based on the 48 khz resolution, I would assume these files are produced by idvd or are tied into quicktime 7. Personally, I use quicktime 6.5.2 on Windows, so YMMV.

Ok, let me explain to you what a bad public movie atom is. I first saw this when I was downloading an mp4 or mpeg4 movie file from a website onto my bit torrent client azureus vuze. So basically when you are downloading a movie or anything it is not being downloaded from the beggining to the end. Which means that, say you were downloading the movie Rush Hour 1 and you stop the downloading to check what has been downloaded.

Surprisingly if you are able to open the half downloaded file (highly unlikely) you might find that only some parts of the movie have been dowloaded, meaning that the first 2 min of the movie might have been downloaded, but the following 30 min might not have been downloaded, despite this the 30-45 min part could have been dowloaded. This means that the movie is not downloaded in chronological order at all.

So basically a bad public movie atom shows up when parts of the movie have not been downloaded but the part right before it and the part right after it has been downloaded. Usually a bad public movie atom error only shows up when you stop the movie at half download and then attempt to play it. Although there have been some rarer cases where even though the whole movie is supposed to have been downloaded this message occurs. This means that during the entire downloading process some of the information was lost during the transfer. Usually if the information is lost the computer takes notice, but sometimes the loss is so less which for example is about 10 bytes, that the computer does not recognize and continues to download. Another reason this could happen is that the program you are downloading with has some bugs.

The way to fix the bad public movie atom could be by zipping and unzipping the file, or by rarring and unrarring the file. The thing you have to understand is that the bad public movie atom error only appears on quicktime and on no other program. So try playing it on anotehr player such as VLC or something else.

No media player will play this corrupt file. Quicktime player is about the only player that will let you know why it can't play the movie. This is not just a Quicktime file that hold information.

[Chinney]

Slow-moving thread.

[Chinney]

On the other hand, check out the view count on this thread. What's up with that?

[psmith2.0]

You no movie-sending sumbitches...

[drewprops]

Scates wants a pr0ny, Mur.



...

[Bryson]

Originally Posted by Chinney On the other hand, check out the view count on this thread. What's up with that?

This thread is the number 1 hit on Google for this particular weird error message.

I tried to play the file that signed " bad public movie atom" using Jet audio player and it did played it !!
Lol !!!!!!!!!!

[murbot]

A Valentines Day gift after 8 1/2 years of searching! Thanks dude!