Perhaps they've become entangled.:cool:

Yeah, you're right. sorry mate. Just a bit (immensely) stressed with this at this point. But again, I REALLY appreciate the input and advice.

I viewed them fine from the external hd in linux (ubuntu live cd) in Totem. Then whenever I view them now from windows or mac OS they're unreadable.

I never copied all the files from the external hd I viewed them in linux directly off the external hd (in totem) and that warped them or changed all the final formats. But I did not copy all the files from the external hd onto linux and then back onto the external (FAT32 formatted) external hd. When linux loaded them into totem, it warped something with the files.

This is a peculiar incident, so, again, you're right I should have been more clear and I genuinely respect your patience immensely.

I'll just run through it again.
1. I view many 1.9 gb .mov files (home videos) in linux and copy maybe 3 or 4 of them onto the linux formatted HD. I view most of them in totem while they're still on the external hd.
2. I change around my oses, reformat and got rid of the linux formatted HD. I only run linux off the live cd, currently.
3. Whenever I view all the files from the external hd in Mac OS or Windows (I need to view them in mac, where all the movie editting software is, though) they appear as that wierd executable file .exec binary file.

I can only deduce that linux changed/warped something with those original files. One thing I could do is reopen them in linux somehow and try to save them specifically as some kind of mac file of sort, but then it still might warp the files.

HAHAH! LOL!! :D :eek:Yes, Quantum Entanglement, right on p65. Much needed comic relief. that's basically what happened! The two file formates (linux and mac) are spatially seperate, but they became quantumly tangled up with each, resulting in this anti-matter existence of a Macinux file format previously a movie! haha.
I love that Dr. who quantum stuff. great refernce.:D

You still aren't being quite precise or detailed enough in your description of the situation.
What I have now understood is as follows:

- you have some video files (each one of size 1.9 GB) on an external hard drive
- you successfully looked at some of these files on the external disk using Totem on a Linux machine
- you currently cannot open these files using any video editing app on your Mac

But you haven't told us:
- how this external hard drive is (or was) attached to your Mac, Windows, and Linux machines (but I'm guessing it is via USB - or was it attached to one of these machines and then shared over the network?)

In addition to the above uncertainties, one thing is extremely unclear. You had previously said:
So you have two copies of these files?
And both copies exhibit the problem?
Both the files on the external disk that you looked while (as I presume) it was attached to a Linux machine, and the files that are on your Mac's internal hard drive?

Not sure if this will help, but anything could paint the picture of my dilemma better at this point. Here's just a simple snapshot of the folder of the files with the Info displayed in Mac OS X 10.4
http://016bc85.netsolhost.com/tmp_sup/warpedfiles.png

In terminal, enter ls -l (that's "LS -L" but in lower case) to list the files with more information showing (ie ownership and permissions)... you should get results that look like this...
Copy a few lines of the output here for us to see.

I'm guessing your files will show permissions like rwxrwxrwx. Finder will show files with executable permissions with the icon your desktop shows. It's possible the ownership is also changed on these files so your chmod command couldn't effect them.

Copy one or two over to your mac and then try the chmod command from earlier... I just remembered that I couldn't chmod or chown anything on my fat32 drive so getting them off that drive might allow you to change the settings.

ok gotta go sleep...good luck

Pictures are always good.
But what would be better is if you would answer my (implicit) questions from my previous post in this thread.
I.e. please explain which of the two copies of these files you are talking about.
And if the files that are giving you trouble are the ones on the external hard drive, then please explain why you don't just use the originals that are on your Mac's internal hard drive.

hey p6s, really appreciate the response. Thanks. I'm not near my mac right now, but will respond with that terminal code excerpt and report after fiddling with the chmod commands ASAP.

they're one and the same, mate. I'm not a moron. If the external hd worked, I'd just use that. Neither source works as of now. Same results (the .exec files) on internal or external hd. That should be pretty frickin' obvious by now.

You need to slow down a bit in your responses and realize that there must be some reason why what seems obvious to you isn't obvious to me.

I ask again for a precise and detailed explanation of what you did and which copy of the files you did it to.
It isn't at all obvious that you did anything at all to the files that are on your Mac's internal disk. You said that you accessed the files that were on your external disk with that program on Linux and that after that you had a problem.
But as far as I have understood so far (from what you have said), you never accessed the files that are on your Mac's internal disk with that program on Linux. And hence it cannot be that Linux program which has changed them.

So if they are changed from what they were before (when you could access them with some OS X program) then it must have been something else that changed them.

Because FAT32 does not support Unix-style permissions, Linux will mount such partitions as 777 (rwxrwxrwx) by default. Perhaps the Mac is now doing the same thing where before it was not. Copying files off the external drive onto the internal drive would retain these same permissions.

It is unlikely in the extreme that the files themselves have been modified in any way. If nothing else, you'd have noticed the harddrive activity while modifying 100+ 2GB files.

It is also possible that you have lost the creator/type metadata that OS X uses when there's no extension (or in preference to the extension). I would try renaming them to have a .dv extension, as the file command shows they are DV files, and not quicktime (.mov) or mpegs (.mpg or .mpeg).

Here's the code:

What's interesting and could easily be a factor of the problem is the group and owner is john_koo, but my userid is john kooz, or Actually that's probably just truncated.

YEEEESSS!! Brilliant deduction ash. appending .dv totally worked. You're right. You understood the problem perfectly. The actual files were not alterred and now even quicktime recognizes and can read and play the file with the .dv suffix. THANKS A TON!!!!!!!! That said, and gratitude expressed, how did this happen again? DV files are like the generic camera file format? How did they transfer from .mov to .dv? How can I prevent that? I've never even heard of .dv before directly. Well, those are supplementary questions, the main problem is solved. thank god it's just an extension alteration!

That said, more importantly, anyone know a good method to compress a 1.9 gb movie file into under 100mb? The length of the actual movie file does not need to change (in other words, I don't need to actually splice the footage).

We might have a chance of answering these questions if you told us exactly what you had done to these files (the ones on your internal Mac drive).
It seems likely that the files didn't have an extension, but were previously being identified as being DV files via one of the other mechanisms (e.g. resource forks).

Since this is a different (and unrelated) question from the topic of this thread, please start a new thread about it. It sounds like it would belong in the Applications section of the forums.

You missed it! We already solved that!

Good call. Thanks. yeah, you're right. This problem is solved.