Mysterious MP4 won't play on computer

[Rebelrouser67]

I just got this Canon Rebel SL2 a few weeks ago.   I've copied all my pictures and videos from it to my computer and all of them played/displayed perfectly...... except for this last video I took yesterday.   It's 9 minutes long and a little over 4 Gig, so it's the biggest one of the videos.  It plays just fine on the camera itself, but the file on the computer shows 0 bytes.  My husband is wondering if it's a "hidden" file somewhere on the camera.  We know it exists and plays (on camera), so why wouldn't it copy to and play on the computer?  Any ideas?   Why would it be any different than the other videos (except quite a bit bigger).

Thanks for any input.

Susan

[RobertTheFat]

What operating system are you using? I seem to recall that some earlier versions of Windows had trouble with files greater than 2GB in length.

[Rebelrouser67]

Hey Bob,

My computers have Windows 8.1, Vista, and Windows 7.  That particularly video won't work on any of them.  We're still thinking it has to be a "hidden" file on the SD card.   Not giving up yet.  Thx for responding.

Susan

[Waddizzle]

I think Bob has raised a crucial point, the file size of 4GB, which I am sure exceeds the 2GB limitations of your versions of Windows.  You probably need to use the Canon Movie Utility to process the file.

How much RAM do you have?  If your machine runs Vista, then I doubt you have enough RAM to load a 4GB file, anyway.

[shadowsports]

FAT32 does have a 4GB file size limitation...  Windows XP was the last microsoft OS that allowed FAT32 to be used as the file system (2001).  NTFS was still more common.

NTFS was introduced in 1994 with Windows NT 3.5.     

Vista, 7 and 8 cannot be installed on FAT32.  They all can read FAT32 FS, but must be installed to NTFS formatted partition.

Windows 10 also uses NTFS as its default file system.

Partitioning schemes MBR and GPT differ in that MBR only allows 4 logical partitions to be created.  A GPT formatted disk can contain an unlimited number of partitions, but windows limits this to 128. 

With either scheme, its possible for the different partitions to be formatted FAT, FAT16/32 or NTFS. 

NTFS supports files up to 16TB in size (IIRC) getting old LoL.

I think the limitation is proprietary to the file system on the camera, not her windows OS.

[shadowsports]

Solved!

You have to use the EOS utility or a card reader.