Trying to Fix a Huge Corrupt .avi File!

[LPrime]

Okay, I've seen a handful of topics in this forum dealing with trying to fix corrupt video files, but they're all kinda different from my problem, so I decided to start a new topic. Here's the situation...

I was using a program called Easy Screen Capture to capture video from my desktop to be used for a lengthy "how to" demonstration. I won't bore you with the details, but needless to say, it was an hour and a half demonstration. After I was done, I saved the video as an .avi file, but now, after all that work, it looks like the file is corrupt and I can't get the dang thing to open (I don't know why it got corrupted, but that appears to be the case now).

And it's a huge file too! About four gigs (I had the settings at the highest quality possible figuring I can always compress it down later if needed). I've never had this problem with smaller video files I've made in a similar manner -- ones only a couple of minutes long -- but sure enough, the one time I need to make an extremely long file, I hit this problem.

When I try to open the file in Windows Media Player, it simply says that it can't prompts me to close the program. And when I try to open it in real player, I get a frozen still frame that looks like the frame was shifted over horizontally and vertically so that there's a big black cross going across it. But in real player, it at least accurately lists the length of the video (which as I said is about an hour and a half), and the scroll bar moves as it tries to play it, but nothing happens.

I went ahead and downloaded a program called "ASF-AVI-RM-WMV Repair" to see if that could help, but all it was able to do was create an avi file consisting of a random 45 second segment from toward the end of the video.

So is there any hope? What should I do? Please help me if you can! As I said, the file is four gigs in size, so I figure there's gotta be at least something salvagable in it besides those 45 seconds. At this point I'll be happy to restore even just a part of the file so I don't have to go through trying to record the entire hour and a half demonstration again (especially if there's a chance I may hit a similar problem).

I hope I've provided enough info. If there's anything I left out, please let me know. Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to offer!!

[Soopafresh]

4GB is the maximum size for some systems, depending on if your drive has been formatted in fat32 or ntfs. NTFS will let you have larger files sizes, fat32 won't.



If you have fat32, then you need to try salvaging this on a machine that is ntfs formatted. I don't think the prospects are good either way, however.

[jman98]

4GB is the maximum size for some systems, depending on if your drive has been formatted in fat32 or ntfs. NTFS will let you have larger files sizes, fat32 won't.

One source I found on the internet seemed to think that even NTFS can't handle AVIs bigger than 4 GB. I think Soopafresh is definitely on to something whether what I read is right or wrong. Look for something to split your AVI file and then see if that fixes your problem. Try to split it into chunks less than 2 GB in size. There are various freeware AVI editors listed in the Tools section. Perhaps one of them can help you.

[redwudz]

1. Drop into Gspot and see what it says. I'm wondering what format 'AVI' is is also.
2. See if it will open with VLC Media Player. That may tell you if it's a codec problem.
3. See if you can open it with VirtualDub or VD Mod. It can scan for bad frames, etc. You can also try to save it out with a direct stream copy, split it or try other operations there.

4GB is a limitation of players, AFAIK. I've had DV AVI much larger than that with no problems. FAT32 formated hard drives have that limitation also, but that doesn't sound like your problem.

[LPrime]

Okay, I checked my drive's format, and it is indeed NTFS, so at least there's that. I had no idea that there was a 4 gig size limitation on video files. But anyway, here's where I'm at so far:

First, I opened the file in GSpot. I'm not familiar with that program, so hopefully I did it right, but here's what it said:

Corrupt AVI header
Chunk: /RIFF:AVI
Offset: 0x00000010
Value:0x000000c0
AVI v1.0

Was there anything else specifically that I should check with it loaded in GSpot?

I had also tried playing it in VLC Player but with no success. No image loaded, and the scroll bar at the bottom immediately jumped almost all the way to the end of the video.

I opened the video with VirtualDub, and it gave me a few warning messages:

AVI: Index not found or damaged -- reconstructing via file scan.
AVI: Invalid chunk detected at 956934288. Enabling aggressive recovery mode.
AVI: Keyframe flag reconstruction was not specified in open options and the video stream is not a known keyframe-only type. Seeking in the video stream may be extremely slow.

Honestly, I have no idea what any of that means, so maybe you can help translate it for me. Also, when I ran Virtual Dub, it recovered a few minutes toward the end of the video (concluding with the 45 seconds I'd already managed to get). What's strange is that when I opened the file in VirtualDub, its window that says "reconstructing missing index block" skipped ahead to about 3.75 gigs into the video. Now, I've never used this program before, and so I was wondering, is there a way for me to get it to at least try reconstructing the first 3.75 gigs and show me what it has, even if the video playback may have tons of glitches?

Also, you suggested using a program to break it up into smaller chunks, less than 2 gigs each. Since I'm new to this kind of thing, is there a program you would recommend that would be able to help me do this the most effectively?

And thanks for all the help so far. If I can just recover a bit more of the video I'll be incredibly happy!

[Soopafresh]

Okay, well that's a bit more positive. I wonder if that file is even compressed with a codec. Reindexing a messed up AVI is fairly easy to do, but a 4GB one would take a long, long time.


I would try encoding it with an app like AutoGK. The output will hopefully end up as a nice, clean XVID file. AutoGK is really easy to use, BTW.

What's the "correct" running time of the video? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? an hour ?

That'll tell us if the file is compressed or uncompressed. See where it says "AVI 1.0"? I think that means old standard (pre OpenDML) issues, which means most programs will have trouble fixing that file because of the size. That's why encoding it to a new file might be a way to get it back.

Regardless, try feeeding it into AutoGK and see if it accepts it.

[LPrime]

Okay, I tried using AutoGK on the file, but it doesn't seem to have worked. I set the predefined size to 1493mb (I hope it wasn't a mistake to do that), but when I clicked preview, it said this:

[4/25/2007 8:01:12 PM] AutoGK 2.40
[4/25/2007 8:01:12 PM] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
[4/25/2007 8:01:12 PM] Job started.
[4/25/2007 8:01:12 PM] Source resolution: 0x0
[4/25/2007 8:01:12 PM] Source fps: 0
*************************************
EXCEPTION: No frames are found.
*************************************
[4/25/2007 8:01:12 PM] Job finished. Total time: 0 seconds
================================================== ==

Of course, I hit preview before telling it to add the job, so maybe I made a mistake there. I don't know. But I added it as a job anyway, and tried to start it, and it said this:

[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] AutoGK 2.40
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Job started.
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Input file: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner.YOUR-B774A72C83\My Documents\chs05.avi
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Input codec:
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Source duration:
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Output file: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner.YOUR-B774A72C83\My Documents\chs05_agk.avi
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Output codec: XviD
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Audio: none
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Subtitles: none
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Format: AVI
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Target size: 1493Mb
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Started encoding.
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Source resolution: 0x0
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Source fps: 0
[4/25/2007 8:02:39 PM] Analyzing source.
*************************************
EXCEPTION: Cannot open file "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner.YOUR-B774A72C83\My Documents\agk_tmp\interlace.log". The system cannot find the file specified
*************************************
[4/25/2007 8:03:13 PM] Job finished. Total time: 33 seconds
================================================== ==

So I guess no luck there, eh? Does any of that stuff it says tell you more about what the problem could be? Sorry if I'm not very good with these new programs.

Also, I believe the correct running time should be 1 hour 30 minutes 26 seconds.

[Nelson37]

My guess would be that you are going to have to do this all over again. It would appear that an hour and a half would represent a time savings at this point.

Check the codecs available to the program and available settings, uncompressed AVI could yield about 2-4 minutes total for a four gig file. Many progs still use this limitation, also I believe it is inherent in AVI 1.0 filetype, though not certain of it. Save frequently, smaller chunks are easier to work with and could have avoided this problem. You may want to install Huffyavi or something similar.

If no compression was used, you have at MOST 5 minutes. Using Huffy or similar, maybe 10 to 15. Very good odds this is uncompressed AVI, and even if you did recover all that the file contained, you have about 2 minutes of video. Depending on the resolution, 45 seconds could very well be the entire recording.

If you have a copy of Ulead Video Studio, it has in the past been able to open files that nothing else would touch, and a conversion was possible.

[LPrime]

I tried Ulead Video Studio, but it wouldn't open the file. As far as only a couple of minutes being four gigs, I wasn't capturing the whole monitor to video. Only an area of about 300x400. I saw that you guys have a page with a whole list of different programs that can try to salvage corrupt video files, but I wouldn't even know where to begin with which ones. Other than the programs that have already been mentioned, are there any other good ones you'd recommend? If I could just somehow open the file, it'd be a huge help, even if only every fourth or fifth minute there was usable footage.

[Soopafresh]

Download this file and unzip. Place the two files in the same folder as your chs05.avi file.

Double click fileinfo.bat to run, it'll create a file called info.txt. Open in notepad and paste it here.



fileinfo.zip

[LPrime]

Wow, that gave me a really strange info.txt file. It simply says:

AVIMaster 1.4.2 (c)2004-2006 by thozie productions, Thomas Ziegler, München
Contact and Bug Reports: www.thozie.de/dnn/AVIMaster.aspx, avimaster@thozie.de
No files to process found.

What the huh??

[Soopafresh]

did I spell your filename correctly ? open fileinfo.bat with notepad and verify the name is correct.


That's it, right ?

[LPrime]

Thanks for your patience. Sorry for the delay. Yeah, sorry, I copied over my file into a new folder I created for the files you gave me, and then I renamed it with the word "backup" on the end just in case (call me extra careful, or even paranoid, but I didn't know what your file might do to it, so I used a backup copy). I changed the file name back to what it was before, and tried again, and here's what I got this time:

AVIMaster 1.4.2 (c)2004-2006 by thozie productions, Thomas Ziegler, München
Contact and Bug Reports: www.thozie.de/dnn/AVIMaster.aspx, avimaster@thozie.de

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner.YOUR-B774A72C83\My Documents\Programs\Unzipping Folders\chs05.avi
Reading 'chs05.avi' (4294972416)
*** Error: File Size mismatch (4294972408)!

Also, I went back and checked the program I used to record. I thought I'd set it to compress with a DivX 6.5.1 codec, but I guess everytime you close the program, it goes back to the default, which is simply "Microsoft Video 1," whatever that means.

So does this help clear up what's going on any?

[Tenderfoot]

LPrime,

Tonight, I just found myself in a very similar situation to yours having recorded an instructional video for nearly 2 hours using CamStudio with the CamStudio Video Codec. When all was said an done, the result was an over sized 3.6GB AVI file that I could not open the file with any of the common video players or video tools..... until I tried using MediaCoder.

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

Believe it or not, this tool was able to open and play the file in its original form without issues. I'm now in the process of converting it to a smaller file using this tool so I'm not sure how its going to turn out, but I have high hopes for a successful conversion.

Give it a shot and see if it works for you as well!

[Ritz009]

I used CamStudio and it while saving the long video it gave me error that audio cannot be saved with avi file.

The video file is of 4GB and nothing worked for me which is mentioned here on this page due to my bad luck

### GSpot failed to open file after saying -
Corrupt AVI header
· Chunk: /RIFF:AVI /LIST:movi
· Offset: 0x00000804
· Value:0xdef9def9
AVI v1.0
and then it crashes...

### VLC opens the file and its all blank for the whole timespan.
### Virtualdub:SubMux
### AviMaster GEnerated Info is attached
### AGK failed with the Virtual Dub crashed and CrashReport is attached

### MediaCoder which is mentioned to fix a file from CamStudio. It processes the file frame by frame but its showing all garbage there in display.

Please help me as I need this video file very very very badly

Thanks in advance.
Ritz

avimasterinfo%20and%20crashreport.zip

[zoraxe]

you can try this program (shareware allows you to try it for 10 days)

http://www.repairvideo.com/
direct link: http://www.repairvideo.com/download.html

I had an avi with bad header and it fixed it like a charm!

It requires you to supply another same type of video file as reference for fixing your video file, so make sure you do give an avi with the same codecs and such.

[zoraxe]

oops missed the part where you mentioned you tried this... sorry.

[Ritz009]

Thanks zoraxe for replying, but it didn't help I tried Fast/Advanced Mode both for no good.

[johns0]

Just so you know that winxp can handle avi files over 50gb in size with no problems,its just that you need a better player like media player classic and the right codecs.

[mpack]

One source I found on the internet seemed to think that even NTFS can't handle AVIs bigger than 4 GB.

The original AVI specification included signed 32bit lengths embedded in the header. So, various players over the years had inherent 1GB, 2GB and 4GB limitations. The last one especially has been a persistent limitation. Note that this is all independant of max file size allowed by the filesystem.

The OpenDML-extended specification for .AVI allows them to break the 4GB barrier, but there are still some tools around that don't support it. This may be the problem.

(* Later edit). In fact, rereading the root message, I rather suspect that perhaps the capture software itself has the 4GB limit and basically trashed itself when it crossed the border. Whether the AVI frames are recoverable or not depends on what it did after that - did it continue writing frames to the file?

What compression did you select? Or was it uncompressed?

[fluffyvideos]

Oh god, I have this very same problem as well. Was recording for 4 hours or so straight on CamStudio and when I saved the .avi nothing can read it. I'm at my wit's end because that was a hell of a lot of work just gone down the drain...

Anyway I was recording using "MSU Screen Capture Lossless Video Codec" (haven't had any problems with it so far). The file is 29171300ms long, 30fps, and 3.22GiB. As oversized as it is I wasn't running out of space in my temp folder when I recorded it, and for the record it's NTFS. But this file isn't 4gigs!... So I've tried a number of things

1. GSpot says it's got a corrupt video header (Details: While processing chunk /RIFF:AVI, found bad length value 192 at file offset 0x00000010 - same thing as what LPrime got) The running time is pretty screwed up, I know I recorded for ages but not 8 hours.

2.And I got pretty much the same error as LPrime when opening it up in VirtualDub-MPEG2, just that the chunk number is different.

3. I used Soopafresh's AVIMaster.exe and also got

(filepath redacted)\blah.avi
Reading 'blah.avi' (3452119552)
*** Error: File Size mismatch (3452119544)!

4. I can open it in MediaCoder (which reports it as SCLS) but I can't actually transcode it to anything, I get Error 13

013

* Description: A video source error is encountered
* Possible causes:
o The active video source cannot decode the input file or device
* Solutions:
o Try other video sources

Yeah sure I'm going to try other video sources, that's not a solution to my problem...


I'm really, really, really desparate to have this file salvaged because unlike "how to do" tutorials it's a painting procses that I cannot replicate like that. I'd wait for days for it to re-encode even. So has anyone got anything to help? I'm pretty dumb when it comes to videos, but surely something can be done when all those frames are there, it's just the header that's got something wrong... is it possible to use a hex editor or something to fix the header even? Input the right length? (not that I'd know what I was doing)

[Soopafresh]

Don't hate me for saying this, but I think you're SOL

[fluffyvideos]

Aw damn.

Well thanks anyway, I guess I'll go look for some innocent puppies to squash now...

Or maybe I'll blame it on my 2-year-old niece who must have been fumbling around with something when I wasn't looking... yeah. :/

[Soopafresh]

I guess I'll go look for some innocent puppies to squash now...

Heh.

Well, just think how much better "Take 2" will be if you decide to do this again.

[luclhk]

Adding to this old thread to tell what did it for me, after trying with no success previous solutions proposed above.

Recorded a 1h23mn avi video/audio file with camstudio 2.6.r294.
File was 2.4GB in size.
Non playable avi with Windows Media Player or camstudio itself or vlc 0.8.4a.
Camstudio Recording options were :
- video : cinepac codec by Radius
- audio : PCM
I used FormatFactory 2.70 (www.pcfreetime.com) to convert the bad .avi to a valid .mp4 file.
.mp4 file is now playable with vlc.

Hope this will be usefull to someone.

[edwardstlouis]

luclhk, you are amazing!!

My 1.5 hour video is completely restored, and works great!

Just to re-iterate what he posted, it works!

Adding to this old thread to tell what did it for me, after trying with no success previous solutions proposed above.

Recorded a 1h23mn avi video/audio file with camstudio 2.6.r294.
File was 2.4GB in size.
Non playable avi with Windows Media Player or camstudio itself or vlc 0.8.4a.
Camstudio Recording options were :
- video : cinepac codec by Radius
- audio : PCM
I used FormatFactory 2.70 (www.pcfreetime.com) to convert the bad .avi to a valid .mp4 file.
.mp4 file is now playable with vlc.

Hope this will be usefull to someone.

[suntips]

LPrime,

Tonight, I just found myself in a very similar situation to yours having recorded an instructional video for nearly 2 hours using CamStudio with the CamStudio Video Codec. When all was said an done, the result was an over sized 3.6GB AVI file that I could not open the file with any of the common video players or video tools..... until I tried using MediaCoder.

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

Believe it or not, this tool was able to open and play the file in its original form without issues. I'm now in the process of converting it to a smaller file using this tool so I'm not sure how its going to turn out, but I have high hopes for a successful conversion.

Give it a shot and see if it works for you as well!

It worked for me too....It fixed the file by just opening it !!!

[_Al_]

Old thread but I got across this problem too, corrupt CamStudio captured file, Huffyuv (via ffdshow) over 2GB .

VirtualDub fixes that file while loading, gives a message:


I exported uncompressed out (for video editor) and everything is fine.
Any file over 2GB is corrupt from CamStudio v2.00.

[driversf]

Sorry for digging up the thread, but same problem 4.0 GB AVI, captured with camstudio, camstudio just crashed when trying to save file but file size was still 4.0GB, tried using format factory and such, similar errors as previous users, but when i tried to output save it as AVI file on format factory, it just saves as some 1 second video. Tried using mediacoder and it'll just crash while trying doing the transcoding process

[Polyb]

I had a similar problem after using camstudio. My file ended up being 4GB and not even virtualdub could fix it.

But lo and behold! There was a solution and VirtualDub still kicks ass!

-Make a copy of the messed up avi file.
-Open VirtualDub (i use 1.9.10, but i guess any new version works).
-Drag or open the copied avi file and let it load into VirtualDub.
-Now go to ´Video/error mode...´ and select "Decode even if result may be garbled", press ok.

Now comes the manual part from your side:
-You need to find what frames are ******* up the clip. Start by clicking on different times in the time line.
-IF VirtualDub crashes, then take note of where it did so and repeat the previous steps (you can set the ´error mode´ to default if you want and later change that back).
-WHEN you have found where the clip is ******* then try to find where in the time line it starts working again.
-Put an ´end arrow´(black one furthest to the right) AFTER the fucked up part.
-And put a ´start arrow´ where you think the fucked up part starts.
(The point is to mark this part of the video in order to delete it.)
-Now just press DEL on your keyboard or go to ´Edit´/...Delete.
(The point is to delete all such error parts so you get a playing file)

After that is done THEN you can save the file
My suggestion is to compress it while your at it (since its probably big) so it gets recoded (fresh and new).

Good luck!
(i´ll probably wont be around this forum that much to respond.)