Shotcut thinks my video is 9942hours long

Shotcut kept crashing trying to add a video to the timeline. It could open and play it in the preview window but every time I put it onto the timeline Shotcut would freeze for roughly 5minutes then crash.

When trying again I’ve noticed Shotcut thinks the video is 9942hours long! Even though the actual video is just 16minutes. My file manager displays the correct time for the video, so does my video player and it plays fine. Another video editor I have installed but don’t use also sees the file correctly.

What is happening here? How can I fix this problem as I really don’t want to switch editors? The video is an OBS recording like all my other videos, nothing has changed in terms of video output settings.
I’m running version 20.09.13

Shotcut uses the time reported by ffmpeg, which is an extremely reliable and popular multimedia library. But it is not going to be possible to support everything perfectly; technology is littered with compatibility issues. That is why you can override the detected duration. With the clip is in the Source player tab, change the Duration in Properties. Then, add it to your playlist or timeline.

Hello, thank you for your response, yeah that fixed it.

My video player is Gnome Videos on Ubuntu which uses gstreamer so that might explain why it was able to get the correct playtime.

Interestingly when I do a ffprobe on the file no duration is listed for that one video. I assume Shotcut takes a guess at the length if there is no value returned?

FFmpeg returns a number. A special high number to FFmpeg’s tools means undefined. To Shotcut it is a number. We could try to detect that and flag it somehow as undefined or live and unusable. That would trigger the dialog suggesting to convert it to some large file since it is an intermediate, which runs ffmpeg as a child. I am not sure what ffmpeg will do. You can try to do that yourself using Properties > Convert. I am curious.

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