problem downloading some .avi's with canon ixus 55

[stv]

Please can someone help me,

I have a Canon ixus 55 with a viking 2GB SD card. I have had these for several months and have had no issues. I went on holiday last week and took several stills and a few video clips, (.avi). I had problems last night downloading the images using zoombrowser. Basically I could download everything apart from two .avi's. As soon as I try to download them I get an error message saying the camera is disconnected and the Zoombrowser window collapses.

I have tried the Microsoft image manager thing and also a Dell package and they all fail at these two avi's. I also tried opening the camera usb drive and copying from there but I get an error message. Finally I tried my SD card reader on my laptop and that fails to download these two .avi's.

The two .avi's in question can be played quite normally on the camera itself which suggests to me there is no SD card problems or corrupted files. One extra bit of info is when I connect my camera to the computer and Zoombrowser launchs, I can see the thumbnails in the window, but unlike all the rest there is no arrow in the top left hand side corner???

I'd really like to get these video clips as they show my sons getting an award which is very precious to me. Please help and apologies if this is already covered in this forum!

[SaNdMaN82]

Hi stv... That's kinda strange... I was going to tell you to use your rear usb ports and try again, but as i've read, you've covered that by using a card reader, and a laptop.... Whenever i try to download great amout of data (lot of pics, and vidz), using my front usb ports, the connection is always lost, causin' that same thing you are experiencing with the zoombrowser...

But, if i use the rear ones, i'm ok. If you're using front ports, just to be sure, i'd use the rear ones... I don't really think that's de solution, but to be honest, i don't know what could it be... I mean, if in the camera the vidz run ok, as you say, it doesn't seem to be data corruption...

[Jon]

Cardreader and Explorer won't work? How big are the files? 2 GB cards can be problematical - we've stickied a very informative thread by DavidW on their eccentricities. I find that my 2 GB SanDisk SD cards won't read in all my readers. A new Viking reader might be the best bet, if you've got access to one; my recent SanDisk SD reader and a "no-name" recently acquired from Sterlingtek both work with my SanDisk cards.

[stv]

Thanks for the reply Jon, where do i find the message from DavidW?

[Jon]

Top of this forum (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=197503).

[stv]

Thanks I read that.

I still cannot understand why I can play the movies on the camera but not download them. Is there error correction on the camera? - Surely if the movies play on the camera then the files on the SD card cannot be corrupted?

Is there some flag set on these files that I don't know about? Maybe It is something really simple? - Maybe I just need to set something like a flag against them?

In zoombrowser, like I said, there is an arrow in the top left hand corner of the thumbnails to download? - but not on these two .avi's. What's all that about?

Is this something I'm going to be plagued with with this camera/SD card, not knowing whether any shot is going to be downloadable or not. If so then it's a crap camera! Please help?

[stv]

Jon,

No reply? - have you finished helping me now?

[Seehund]

Have you tried shooting a "small" video, say, <50MB? Can you transfer that file?

If you can transfer "small" files (photos and short video clips) but not "large" ones (video clips >200MB or so), then you probably have the same problem as lots of others seem to have, including me and my A620.

See here, for example:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1010&thread=17233844
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=125912

It seems like a software problem to me, but I don't know if it's Canon or Microsoft that's to blame. Everything works fine in Linux with the same camera and the same computer here.

[stv]

Seehund,

Thanks for your interest. The 2 files concerned are bigger than anything else that I've tried - (they are approx 300MB each). This is something that I didn't really latch onto. Tonight I shall film something bigger and see if that downloads. Canon helpdesk is a pile of poop, the guys really don't know where it's at. I asked them what sd cards makes and sizes they support and they said Canon - hmmm that's helpful lads!

My problem is not knowing whether a film clip is going to be ok or not.... Should I develop a time lmit on my filming to make sure it is under a certain size???

[Seehund]

Canon helpdesk is a pile of poop, the guys really don't know where it's at. I asked them what sd cards makes and sizes they support and they said Canon - hmmm that's helpful lads!

Agreed! They're just as worthless as most helpdesks are. They basically know how to copy-and-paste the FAQs and manuals which you've already read before contacting them... After I got the totally irrelevant FAQs quoted and I described the problem again, they simply wrote back that they think there is a problem. Duh.

BTW, my SD card is a 1GB TwinMOS Ultra-X (150x speed).

My problem is not knowing whether a film clip is going to be ok or not.... Should I develop a time lmit on my filming to make sure it is under a certain size???
Get an SD card reader, they're cheap. With a card reader, downloading files of any size works fine for me, both with Windows Explorer and Canon CameraWindow/ZoomBrowser.

I noticed that there is a new update (5.7) to ZoomBrowserEX available now. Perhaps needless to say, this didn't fix the problem.
(Note that the update for some reason is only available from the Canon USA site)

[Drood77]

I faced the same problem recently and that is why started looking for the solution on the Internet.

I was not able to download videos larger than 200 MB from Canon IXUS 60 with 2GB Transcend SD card to PC (Windows XP) using either XP or Canon provided software.

But I found a kind of workaround - the videos had been downloaded fine when the download was initialized from the camera itself (instead of initializing from PC).

Hope this idea could help to those facing the same problem.