PMB hangs while trying to analyze current video environment

[koomou]

Hello all.

Well, the title says it all, really. I have a HDR-CX155 handycam, and the included PMB (v.5.0) used to play without a glitch on my old winXP Pro SP3 box. Unfortunately, that box now sleeps with the fishes, so I had to go out and buy a new one. I opted for Win7 PRo 64-bit (woe me). I tried installing the bundled PMB, and then tried installing the newest PMB I downloaded from Sony (v 5.8). In both cases I get the same behaviour: the installation runs smoothly, up until the installer tries to "Apply the standard settings". There, it says "Inspectng the current video environment" and never proceeds - it's currently in that state for about a day, so I think it's safe to say that it has hung.

Moreover, I tried installing PMB on a virtual machine (windows XP mode). It installed without a glitch, however I am unable to import the video files I have, because the VM is not recognizing the attached camera as a camera, but rather as an external disk, and I can't for the life of me find where I can tell PMB (on the VM) that this is actually a camera and not an external disk.

Any help with either of these issues is greatly appreciated, as I have a boatload of data on the camera, that's been sitting there for more than a month now.

[gugabackhand]

Hi Check this link out.Look for "I want to install PMB on Windows Vista® 64-bit edition / Windows® 7 64-bit edition."

http://support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/www/disoft/int/pmb/trouble/index.html

[koomou]

Hello, and thanks for the reply.

However, it doesn't seem to solve my problem, as for my version (5.x) it only states "You can install your PMB on Windows Vista® 64-bit edition / Windows® 7 64-bit edition" and that it will operate in 32-bit mode. Well, I did install it, and it hangs

[Mick2011]

Often the simplest way to fix what is, after all, a software conflict, is to try different software. PMB may well be taking issue with a component in your W64 setup and it could be very difficult to troubleshoot. My guess is something very similar like Windows Live would work, or you could try out a commercial image browser which invariably gives you better all-round functionality than PMB anyway.

On your VM XP it may simply be a question of switching the camera USB settings to 'mass storage' or try using a card reader...

Hope that's of some use.

Cheers

Mick

[koomou]

Thank you for your reply, Mick.

I'd gladly drop my quest to make PMB work on my weven box, if I had an alternative in mind. With still images I don't really care, windows preview + GIMP are just fine for me. But with the videos, it's a whole new ballgame. From what I can gather, video clips are stored in .mts files on the camera, but importing them with PMB makes a conversion to m2ts (whatever that is) and also creates (?) two more files per clip, a m2ts.moff (binary file) and a m2ts.modd (xml-like structure with a chunk of hexadecimal data right in the middle). If I knew of a program (commercial or otherwise) that can cope with both .m2ts (my existing archive) and .mts files (whatever I'll be shooting from now on), then I'd probably make the jump. Care to name any?

Regarding the switch in the camera USB settings, I tried all 3 modes the camera is offering, but to no avail.

[koomou]

Heh, I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem (and at the same time, sad that this issue exists).

https://www.sony.gr/discussions/message/774122

I tried running everything (the unzip program, the install program and subsequently launch PMB itself) as administrator (as suggested there), and it still hangs while inspecting the current video environment.

So I'm currently out of options. My handycam comes with a 15Gb in-device memory, so I haven't used a memory card with it (therefore a card reader is currently not an option) and I don't know of any third-party tools that do the job PMB does with video clips. So I guess I'll have to wait for a 64-bit version of PMB...

[blaireau_photo]

Hello all

Just a thought about the internal disc - when you have it plugged in via USB, does it show as an external drive when browsing on 'My Computer / Computer'? If it does, you could look through the folders within the drive and then cut and paste the .mts to a folder on your PC. There are software products such as .....

http://www.mtsconverter.com/mtstoaviconverter.html

..... that can do this if you can extract the files off of the camera in the first place.

Thanks,

Simon

[koomou]

Thank you Simon.

I've downloaded mts to avi converter and will give it a spin as soon as I find the time.

Regards,

Yiannis

[farigiovanni · Accepted solution]

hi, I got the same problem in win 7 64-bit and after two weeks a found a solution who worked for me, when I finished to install pmb, 5.8 I restart, pressed F8 on boot and i log in my pc in safe mod with network, and soon as I launch the pmb application I got the video enviroment inspection done in maybe 4 second I hope can be helpfull

[hb.smiley]

Thanks, fairgiovanni, safe mode worked for me on Win8!