repairing mp4's

Ruz

so yeah ,was transferring some pics and mp4's from smartphone to pc, then it just crashed and basically got rid of  all the files.
Managed to rescue nearly all the pics with file recovery software but not the mp4's . i have tried nearly all the software out there but no luck so far.
The files are quite big ie there no 0kb files, but is there any way to rescue this stuff?. I used 'disk digger' originally, but it does state in the manual that it struggles with any large files.I also tried 'mp4 fix' but it did n't work.

ZacD

Does VLC play them at all?

Ruz

no, I did try, no joy. maybe they are just too corrupted?

m4dcow

In the past I've used easus data recovery but IIRC the free version only allows a certain amount of data to be recovered. I have also heard decent things about recuva which is freeish (no data recovery or feature limit). Try not to use the phone much or at all as you risk overwriting blocks of data and losing the ability to recover permanently.

Hopefully either of those can help you recover what you need.

throttlekitty

I've sometimes had success with a brutish method in a hex editor. I'll scroll down to the bottom and see if there's some obvious corruption, like thousands of repeated zeros or something where I'd expect to see some data. Delete all that, maybe pull a footer from a working file if things don't appear too complicated and hope for the best. With video, there's probably stuff in the header like total time or number of frames that might need fixing, which would probably be hopeless- but if nothing else is working...

NikhilR

Hi Ruz,
This worked for me, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGBqwm7yyM
Also love your work!

Eric Chadwick

Dig around in videohelp.com they have a ton of tools listed. Usually with video files the header contains important info, like kitty says... if that's damaged the rest is a mess.

Ruz

well hopefully there is a chance as the files are quite big , so maybe all the info is still there

but anyway thanks for the links and tips guys, will give it a try tomorrow

RN

Depending on how broken it is this method won't work, but when I need some light repairing on a weird MP4 I run it through FFMpeg with copy streams -- it doesn't re-encode the video so it finishes in a second, it just copies the audio and video data and fixes the headers and metadata I think.
The command line is this:
ffmpeg -i "path\to\video.mp4" -c:v copy -c:a copy "path\to\output.mp4"

Ruz

well the ones I  have rescued so far are not the ones I thought they would be, not even sure that the files I wanted are still on the phone. Its a real shame as they are holiday videos when were in korea last year.
I will maybe run one of the programs on my phone again, see of it can dredge any more files up

Tekoppar

If you can mount your phones internal storage as mtp under a Linux distro you can use photorec to attempt a recover.

NikhilR

Let me know if the method I linked worked for you. I managed to save several videos using that.
Also I could help you with recovery since I have the thing set up on my side. (provided you're okay with sharing the videos)

Ruz

NikhilR - thanks I have to go through my phone again soon and see if the original file are still there
I have got a feeling they are gone:/

m4dcow

Ruz said:

NikhilR - thanks I have to go through my phone again soon and see if the original file are still there
I have got a feeling they are gone:/

Plug the phone into a computer, and turn on transfer files mode (or whatever it is called) to make it like an external usb drive, and run recuva on it, if the original files were there and you haven't written crazy amounts of data to the phone, you should be able to recover some of them.

Ruz

m4dcow - well what I did originally was to install 'disk digger' on the phone itself which worked fine. There were no obvious image files in the usual folders like DCIM etc but disk digger got nearly all the photos 'but' corrupted all the MP4's.
It does actually say in the disk digger readme that it is not very good with larger files

Since then I have been trying to fix the files that Disk digger spat out.  I think the original files are long gone though, as its over a year since we came back from Seoul

m4dcow

So did you try transferring recently and you got the crash or was the crash and attempt at recovery long ago.

In any case why I recommend plugging the phone into a computer and running the software on said computer is that every byte of new data that is written to the phone has a chance of being written over your lost data. Simply by installing disk digger on the phone may have overwritten data, and when it recovered the files I'm assuming onto the phone drive itself, it could have overwritten data too.

Hopefully you can recover some of your stuff, but if something along those lines happens again don't write any data to that same device/disk.