Only preview plays
 

I've used Limewire for a long time and have only encountered this problem recently. I am downloading a movie, say 200 MB. After a little bit I preview it through Limewire to see if it is the right movie. The preview plays and I finish the download. When I go to open the file all that opens is a minute long movie of the preview that I saw, but Finder clearly says that the movie is 200MB large. I was wondering if anybody has experienced this or has any idea what I could do besides redownloading the entire file and not previewing it at all.

btw Using the latest version of OS X and Limewire

Are you sure you played back the movie from the LW dwnld folder & not the Preview file? Everytime yo preview a file, LW creates a preview file. It generally is stored i the incomplete folder & starts with the prefix Preview.

Have you tried viewing it with another player? eg: VLC (has built in codecs) or MPlayer And also ensure you have the latest codecs for QT such as DivX, XviD, 3ivx , etc.

I must confess I think your problem happened to me once but I can't remember what I did. lol :D

Yes I was opening the file from the Download Folder, not the preview file. I tried VLC and it showed the entire movie, but for some reason Quicktime will not...mystifying...

also forgot to mention that it is an mpg file so I don't think it's a codec issue.

After reading through the thread a little more carefully (actually, the first time I just read the last post :p), I realised that it is indeed not a codec issue.
The problem is that a small corruption occured somewhere (probably during the download process). The corrupted data prompts Quicktime to read it as a "stop-point", hence the premature stop. Fortunately, VLC does play it, and if it doesn't, mplayer will.