Cannot Compare By Content MKV Files

[MichelBeauchamp]

Hello y'all....

I should have asked this question ages ago....

I cannot "Compare by contents" MKV compressed files....

Am I missing a plugin or an add-on?

Anyone? Thank you! §:c)

[Dalai]

I cannot "Compare by contents" MKV compressed files....

Means what exactly? What happens when you use this TC feature? Does it not at all, does it work until a certain point? Do you get any error messages, if so, which one(s)? Did you wait long enough? Because MKVs can be quite large.

Generally TC can compare any file type by contents because it doesn't care about the contents (for the comparison itself).

Regards
Dalai

[MichelBeauchamp]

I cannot "Compare by contents" MKV compressed files....

Means what exactly? What happens when you use this TC feature? Does it not at all, does it work until a certain point? Do you get any error messages, if so, which one(s)? Did you wait long enough? Because MKVs can be quite large.

Generally TC can compare any file type by contents because it doesn't care about the contents (for the comparison itself).

Regards
Dalai

Nothing happens... It just shows me the crossed out equal sign (≠). All other files that would be in the same directory are treated correctly, but the mkv file is shown in red as unequal (≠).

Edit: Just realized something...

When with a group of files, using F9 -> cm_FileSync : I get an unequal red sign (≠) for the mkv files, and all the others are = or an arrow.

When using a single file using F11 -> cm_CompareFilesByContent, that is when I get an error code of "not enough memory". But I am running with 4G of RAM in my machines....

[Dalai]

So you're talking about the directory sync function, not compare by contents. Unequal files have either different sizes and/or different timestamps. How they're treated depends on the settings in the sync tool. I explained this already in this thread: [SOLVED - no bug] files different in date in DIR sync tool.

Regarding the comparison by contents: General rule of thumb is that TC can compare files of any size, but if it finds a difference and tries to show that, TC 32 bit will fail most of the time with large files. How large depends on how much free contiguous memory blocks there are. Total memory is not really a relevant factor, the most important thing is how large is the largest free block of memory.

In short: If you intend to compare large files, and want to see where the differences are, use TC 64 bit. If you only want to know if they're different and don't care about the location of the differences, enable [X] by content and [X] ignore date in the sync tool (or use the regular compare by contents function, and ignore it's error message).

[EDIT] Typo [/EDIT]

Regards
Dalai

[MichelBeauchamp]

Thanks for the input.

In the meantime, I did a little test. Took an mp4, converted it to mkv (which basically doubled in size), made a copy and ran F9 and F11 on both files, and all went well.

So it seems I was only hitting memory maximums all along....