Meaning of .idxb files

[rhino]

I was on this forum several days ago for the first time - see my Newbie Questions post for details - and got some very valuable help that enabled me to achieve my objective of making several clips from a film. I've got one followup question. Saving my excerpts as .mp4 files also resulted in the generation of several files with the extension .idxb.

What do those .idxb files mean or do? Is there any reason I shouldn't simply delete them?

[eumagga0x2a]

*.idxb files are binary (not human-readable) dumps of a part of index structures created by MP4 and Matroska demuxers in Avidemux to speed up subsequent loading of respective MP4 or MKV files as Avidemux decodes frame or slice headers to verify frame type and keyframe property when loadings such files with MPEG-4 (DivX / Xvid), H.264 and HEVC video codecs which may take a lot of time.

It is absolutely safe to delete them.

[rhino]

*.idxb files are binary (not human-readable) dumps of a part of index structures created by MP4 and Matroska demuxers in Avidemux to speed up subsequent loading of respective MP4 or MKV files as Avidemux decodes frame or slice headers to verify frame type and keyframe property when loadings such files with MPEG-4 (DivX / Xvid), H.264 and HEVC video codecs which may take a lot of time.

It is absolutely safe to delete them.

So they're essentially an artifact of the re-encoding process and are NOT needed to work with the generated mp4 file afterwards: that's good to know! Thanks for your quick response

[sark]

So they're essentially an artifact of the re-encoding process and are NOT needed to work with the generated mp4 file afterwards:

Not an artifact of the re-encoding process, but the decoding process.
Large files can take a long time to decode and open in Avidemux. Saving the idx files associated with a video file will speed up opening/loading on future editing sessions.
Some here would rather their creation could be disabled. Personally, I just use the following batch script to hide them.
Changing +h to -h unhides hidden idx files.

Code Select Expand

attrib +h *.idx /s

[Grumpycats]

I hope they plan on letting us toggle this feature on/off, I work with many small files daily and the directory ends up being filled with a boatload of idxb files.