How to Open or View Old Media 100 Media Files

[Andrew Mehta]

I quickly downloaded them, and immediately noticed their icons don’t automatically switch to Media100 icons, like my other M100 footage on this computer, and indeed, when trying to open them in Quicktime Player 7 I have no luck.

Are we concluding the files are corrupt in some way?
Weren’t there additional (usually invisible) files with information on the files, that allowed them to be read by Mac OS and so forth? Perhaps these are missing. This often happens when files are transferred via a PC or something else that doesn’t recognise the additional data Apple stores with each file.
I’m just guessing/wondering of course, =S.

You posted in October.
Have you had any luck since?

[Eric Leven]

Thanks for looking at the files. I haven’t had any luck on my side.

I can’t rule out corruption, but the files were backed up on the same computer that used to be able to read them; it’s possible that there were some missing invisible files, but I don’t have a reason to think so.

Thanks again,

eric

[Andrew Mehta]

What system were they last working on? OS version? Media 100 version?

[Eric Leven]

The files would’ve been from ’99 or ’00. I think it was an OS 9 version of Media 100; not sure which one.

-eric

[Andrew Mehta]

I’ll try it on my Media 100i 7.5 (OS9) system a bit later, and post back my findings.

[Floh Peters]

How did you back them up? From where did you recover/restore them? To me it looks like the whole QuickTime Atom structure is missing from the files, which describes the content/resolution/codec and everything else about the content of the files. Without these QuickTime does not know anything about the content and the structure of the supplied data, and it would be very hard (if not impossible) to reconstruct the content.

[Eric Leven]

I believe our editorial staff used Retrospect to back up the files to tape; I’m not sure how they were restored. However, my understanding is that these files (at the time) were not readable by Quicktime, they were proprietary to Media 100. I could be mistaken though, and you’re right, it’s possible that they are corrupted.

[Gregg Eshelman]

Sounds like the files have lost their resource forks due to the never to be sufficiently damned “Apple Double” file system, designed to be incompatible with everything else on Earth.

If these are Quicktime MOV files and the backup was made from a “Classic” Mac operating system and done properly, the resource forks should be on the backup, but hidden as they normally are.

If this is a backup compressed into a proprietary Retrospect format you will have to setup an old Mac with OS 9.2.2 or earlier, with Retrospect, to restore the files so you can get at them properly.

If the backup is just a direct copy where you can access the media and see the files, then you need a PC running Windows and one of the programs for accessing Mac formatted media. There are a couple of free ones, look up the EMaculation Mac emulation website. Or buy a copy of TransMac.

What to do is extract the Resource fork first then add the .MOV extension to the file name. Next, extract the Data fork and give it a .QTR extension. Make sure the rest of the names of both files are identical.

On Windows, as long as both fork files are in the same folder, Quicktime will play the video, if you have the Media100 playback only codec installed. Good luck finding a copy since Media 100 went back to Mac only! Contrary to what the website claimed, the Windows version of the codec supported realtime playback. I may have a copy, somewhere, deeply buried, on an olde CD-ROM. Someone ought to archive that thing in a hundred different places.

I dunno if Quicktime for OS X will work with these if both fork files are in the same folder.

There is a fix for the split forks! Google Logiciels & Services Duhem and get their free QT-Flattener.exe ‘Course it’s for Windows. Feed your split Quicktime videos to that and you now have portable, non-self-destructing video files – with that inconveniently antique M100 encoded video inside. QT Flattener shouldn’t need the Windows M100 codec to work.

There is/was another way to flatten split Quicktime videos, the Pro version of Quicktime. I assume it had to have the proper codecs to read the videos you were exporting as flat files.

I went through all this some years ago when I was noodling around with a “Vintage” NuBus Media 100 system in a Radius 81-110, maxed out with 128 megs of 23 meg IBM (HaHa!) 72 pin SIMMs. Captured from a HiFi Stereo VHS to the Mac, edited then exported to uncompressed M100 Codec on a 17gig SCSI drive, which was then hooked up to a much faster Win XP box for conversion to 480×480 SVCD MPEG format.

[Matthew Hall]

Hey everyone! Bumping this as I’m having almost the exact same issue. Old Media100 Files, from the year 2000. Backed-up from a Mac in 2000, and now trying to open on a Mac running the most recent version of Media100 on a Mojave 2014 Mac.

Was there ever a stream-lined solution discovered to enable these older Media100 files to be opened? The above solution regarding forked data is totally over my head 🙁

You can see in Finder, the files preview icon has not updated… they seem completely unreadable.

Screen-Shot-2020-10-27-at-4.30.09-PM.png 21 KB Image File - Click to view

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[Gregg Eshelman]

See if the latest Mac port of FFMPEG supports Media 100. 9 years ago I provided some samples to help get support added. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/959