Recovering damaged/corrupted video files.

Andreas

I have a cheap-ass microSD card in my phone and have just found out I've probably lost a lot of footage I shot over the weekend. The separate files are there, they show up on the phone and computer, and they are suitable sizes, a few megs instead of the traditional few kilobytes of a corrupted file. But they don't play on either my phone or computer. Some clips are fine, but others are not.

Can anyone recommend software that I could use to maybe get some of these clips back? Any help would be very appreciated.

Eric Chadwick

What file format? Tools generally read only a few specific formats.

VirtualDub is good, but only loads AVI unless you get VirtualDubMod which takes a few MPEG formats (DVD, etc.) instead.

AVIdemux can load a bunch, and does some error-checking.

MPEG Streamclip can load anything that the QuickTime player can load, and does some error-checking.

Andreas

The files I'm trying to recover/fix are .mp4's.

EDIT: God damn and half the images I took as well apparently. .jpeg format for them.

Ben Apuna

I've read of people doing various linux command line + ffmpeg voodoo, but I know nothing else of these dark arts... You might want to look into it.

Eric Chadwick

Sounds like you're kind of screwed. You might be able to recover some of the footage, but you'll probably have lots of dropouts and artifacts.

MP4s should load in AVIDemux and MPEG Streamclip, both of which are free. You can use them to repair timecode issues, etc.

Andreas

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Sounds like you're kind of screwed.

If Mulder and Scully could enlarge and enhance images of ghoulish faces reflected in the 4 pixels of a photo of the back of a spoon ten years ago, I can do this now! :poly142: Not gonna give up just yet. Thanks for the suggestions, and if anyone else had any, I'd like to her em!

ppe

I think I have some kind of rescue software that came free with the memory card (I use SanDisk cards in my camera but others might have similar solutions). It was useless though with usb drive which was accidentally formatted. For that I had to use Easeus Recovery (which is not free) but it did a superb job. I was able to get much more safe out of it than anybody expected. It was not just formatted but I actually managed to install an operating system to it when it was supposed to go to an exactly same size SSD. :poly127:

Andreas

Thanks ppe, I will put Easeus on the list of things to try!