AVI, Virtual Stack, >1GB boundery?

Posted by JesperSP on Nov 26, 2008; 3:00pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/AVI-Virtual-Stack-1GB-boundery-tp3693422.html

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to analyze some very large AVI movies in ImageJ. I thought I had everything covered when I found the "open as virtual stack" function. However, when I'm trying to open a 1.3GB AVI containing 15495 frames of 348x256 it stops exactly at frame 11934 (348x256*11934 = 1063176192 bytes corresponding to just below 1GB). I have tried to tell the plugin that I only want to open frames 11900-15495, both as virtual and non-virtual stack and in this case it only opens frames 11900-11934. I managed to save all the frames as TIFs in a folder and then I was able to open all a virtual stack with all frames using the "Import"->"TIFF virtual stack..." function. I then saved the stack as AVI with PNG compression which resulted in a file of 552 MB. I was able to load the resulting AVI file without any problems in ImageJ, both as virtual and non-virtual stack.

My conclusion is that ImageJ (or Java in general?) cannot access positions beyond 1GB of files (under windows XP 32Bit).

I'm going to be analyzing a lot of these very large files (possibly up to 14GB) in the future, so I would very much like to find a different workaround than saving all images as individual tifs or compressing movies. Is there a way to read AVI's larger than 1GB in ImageJ? If it's imposible under windows XP 32bit, is it then possible if I install a 64bit operating system (e.g. UBUNTU 64bit?).

Suggestions are very welcome ....

Cheers,
Jesper