Recovering bad AVI or other file

Lajko wrote on 9/5/2002, 1:09 AM

I have a few old file which have errors somewhere in them. They can play for a while in Real Player, but not much more. Vegas won't import the file in any way and other players (i.e. Media Player) just turn their digital noses up at them.

However, what I can view is enough to satisfy my needs for at least a partial recovery so there is video I can use rather than discard. After all, you could always cut out a bad portion of a film where the sprockets were damaged. Why not with a video FILE????

Does anyone know of something that can copy a video file (avi or other) up until it encounters an error? That would allow recovering at least part of the file. Or how about one which copies good video and just skips the bad parts, rather than doing the usual Microsoft ideology process of crashing and doing nothing. That is, "let's cut out the bad sprokets and save what film we can"???

I think this could help a lot of us - especially if we begin to encounter errors on old DV tape or files that were partially trashed due to disk errors or bad transmission over the internet.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 9/5/2002, 12:05 PM

Repairing "broken" videos is at best a iffy thing.

For AVI (especially DivX) you may want to try Divfix written by Budai Csaba in Hungry. It works by repairing or creating a missing or damaged index which for AVI is at the end of the file, as oppsed to the beginning of the file which is the case for MPEG files. The reason you usually need an entire AVI file to play it. This little utility also detects and attempts to repair the more serious file errors.

For MPG there is MPGSPLIT by Stefan Eckart, Germany. A simple stripper that works at the command prompt that seperates the video and audio streams and also attempts some repair of common file errors.

You can download DivFix here: http://www.divx-digest.com/software/divfix.html
You can download MPGSPLIT here: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/chem/project/tools/vmpeg/

spidey2002 wrote on 9/5/2002, 7:21 PM

Or you can use vdub to edit your bad avi files. delete the bad ones and use stream copy to save your edited file.

BillyBoy wrote on 9/5/2002, 9:44 PM

Is there a way around the 'synch error' that VirtualDub reports when rendering a file? Every time I open a "bad" file in VD, it stops rendering reporting that error. You can get around the bad spot by selective rendering and patching the whole thing together at the expense of dropping some frames, but annoying.