The Digital Video Machine and Video Binloop use a special implementation of the FAT32 file system.
This file system is widely used, and will allow your flash cards to be accessible from any Windows based PC or MAC computer. Although the supported volume size of Compact Flash cards is much larger, the maximum file size supported by the FAT32 implementation in the reproducers is 2GB. Your Windows PC will allow you to copy a larger file (up to 4GB) to the flash card, but the reproducer will not be able to access this file. This will result in a fault condition (Red flashing LED) if you attempt to play the file.
If your application requires a longer playback time than a 2GB limitation will allow, the best solution is ‘split’ the file into several segments using a file-splitting program. One suggestion is a software package called File Splitter, which can be downloaded at http://www.filesplitter.org/. Using this method, a large file can be separated into several segments which a reproducer can treat as a single coherent video file. Here’s how it works.
Let’s say that you have encoded a 5GB video file (Program Stream) that you want to play in the DVM. First, you will need to use a utility (like File Splitter) to divide this file into several chunks smaller than 2GB. To be safe, you could divide the file into 1GB chunks. When the splitting process is complete, you should have 5 files. Rename those files like this:
VID00001.MPG
VID00001.001
VID00001.002
VID00001.003
VID00001.004
Keep in mind that VID00001.MPG is the first segment, VID00001.001 is the second segment, and so on. When you are finished renaming the files, copy them to the DVM’s Compact Flash card. At this point, all you have to do is treat VID00001.MPG as you normally would. For example, if you send a command to Play File #1, the reproducer will automatically play through all of the file chunks without you having to do anything special. You can also send a command to Loop File #1, and the entire file will loop from start to finish just as you would expect.