Why Does LifeFlix Stop Importing Mid-Tape? Segment Breaks Explained

This is one of the most common questions we receive, and the good news is it is not a bug. Here is what is actually happening and how to get around it.

What is a segment break?

When you recorded on a MiniDV tape, every time you pressed stop and record again, the camera wrote a new timecode segment onto the tape. If you ever powered the camera off and back on again between recordings, or if the battery died mid-session, or if you rewound the tape and played it back before recording more footage, there is a chance you created a gap on the tape where no video and no timecode was recorded. That unrecorded gap is called a timecode break or segment break.

Why does LifeFlix stop at these breaks?

LifeFlix is designed to detect the end of a tape and stop automatically so you do not sit watching hours of blank tape after your footage ends. When LifeFlix hits a segment break or a gap in the recording, it reads that gap the same way it would read the end of a tape. It stops because it thinks the tape is done.

This is intentional behaviour, not a fault in the software. The problem is that on some tapes, especially ones recorded casually over many months or years, there are multiple gaps scattered throughout the footage.

How to fix it: use the Resume button

LifeFlix has a Resume feature specifically for this situation. When your import stops before you expect it to, look for the Resume button in the upper left corner of the screen, next to the blue Import button. Click it and LifeFlix will continue importing from where it left off, skipping past the gap.

Repeat this process as many times as needed. Each section of footage between gaps will be captured as a separate clip.

How to combine the clips after capture

Once you have captured all the segments, you can use the Combine button in LifeFlix to merge separate clips into a single continuous file. This is the cleanest way to reassemble footage that was split across multiple gaps.

What if the gap is too long and Resume does not help?

If there is a very long blank section on the tape, sometimes more than a few seconds of unrecorded tape, Resume may time out before it reaches the next recorded section. In this case, the fastest approach is to manually fast forward your camcorder past the blank section, then start a new import from that point.

Why do some tapes have more gaps than others?

Tapes that were used across different cameras, shared between family members, or recorded over multiple years are much more likely to have timecode breaks. Tapes that were recorded on a single camera in a single session from start to finish rarely have this issue.