Humax Foxsat HDR files on Windows 10 fixed

Teadrinker

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If you have copied foxsatHDR TS files to your PC and are thinking of upgrading your PC to Windows 10 you should probably read this. If not, well .. its a long story .. so I shouldn't bother.

For some years now I have been happily copying files off my Foxsat HDR to my PC so I can free up space on the Humax hard drive and still view the programs either directly on my PC or stream from there to my TV using my WD Live TV box. To achieve the copying process I used Raydons Media and File Server Bundle - a great piece of work but I only used the FTP server bit. This all worked magnificently with Windows 7 but then ... (cue Jaws theme tune) ... I upgraded to Windows 10.

I'm generally very happy with the upgrade to Windows 10 and very glad I bypassed Windows 8 (sorry, a bit off topic there) except :

Using File explorer to navigate to my Videos folder that contained the ex-Foxsat TS files caused a major issue. Just clicking on the videos folder (to select it) caused the PC hard drive utilisation to rush up to 100% and stay there seemingly indefinitely, locking out File explorer completely. Using the resource monitor of Windows 10 to look at what was contributing to this, it was apparent that Windows had started concurrent tasks that were reading each of these TS files in their entirety. I had to abort File Explorer via the task manager to restore order.

My first guess was that Windows was trying (and failing) to generate thumbnails for these videos and as a quick fix I renamed all the .TS files in the folder to .OLD. I had to do the rename via the Command prompt since File explorer would be locked out. This at least stopped the sillyness and I could still view the videos on the PC (using 'open with ...' to select my application of choice) but not on my TV via the WD Live TV box since that device was expecting a proper video file extension. So I needed to delve deeper.

Thinking that it must be a thumbnail generation issue I used the K-Lite Codec Tweak Tool to disable thumbnail generation for TS files. I then renamed one of the vidoes back to '.TS' to see if the problem went away. File explorer now allowed me to select the folder and the individual video file without going bananas but then - more horror - when I right clicked on the file, file explorer went back to 100% disk utilisation. I renamed it back to .OLD and thought again.

The next actions consisted of many dark alleys involving file converters, large capacity USB sticks and no joy whatsoever so I'll draw a veil over that bit.

In my many internet searches for any related help I came across an update to Raydons package - a utility called 'convert files'. I think he had written it to provide better compatibility with some streaming devices and rather downplayed its potential usefulness in his description. So it was with no great expectation when I installed that update and tried it out on one file on my Foxsat. It converted on the Humax OK and I FTP'd it to my PC. I right clicked on the file in my videos folder and the only thing that happened was that the appropriate context menu popped up ! I re-enabled the thumbnail generation for ts files via the Codec Tweak Tool and it now generated a thumbnail for that video with no alarms whatsoever. I've now started the process of converting many Gbytes of video (have to FTP back to Foxsat, convert then FTP back to PC) so I may be some while.

There were several changes made to File Explorer in going to Windows 10 and I assume its just a lot more picky with how it treats video files than the previous version was.

I hope this is (or will be) of use to some people - many thanks again to Raydon and his band of helpers who made this possible. I bet they never thought they would be solving a problem with Windows 10 !!
 
Interesting. Did you try switching off file indexing in Win 10 File Explorer, Properties?
 
A guess but a .TS contains the whole transport stream so possibly 6 separate programmes, more if radio. I think, but am not sure, that convert files strips out the others.
 
I didn't try switching off file indexing. I have a few unconverted TS files left in my video folder so I switched off file indexing for that folder via the control panel and renamed the file back to '.ts'. Again, when I selected the file, the disk utilisation soared up to 100% while the file was read in its entirety. Renamed the file back again. I think I'll carry on with the conversions. Maybe I'll leave one in case there are other ideas.
 

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