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  1. i desperately need some help...here's what happened:

    i recently purchased two 250gb drives for my video editing machine and they installed fine. i then moved a bunch of captured video (AVI files captured via firewire from my miniDV cam) over to one of the drives...about 180gb worth. hearing that dynamic disks in Windows XP may give me better performance, i upgraded my drives to dynamic from basic disks...that ran fine for about 4 hours...then, both drives stopped showing up in windows explorer and showed as "dynamic unreadable" in disk management.

    after a lengthy call to Micro$oft (they couldn't help btw), i found a nice app called R-Studio that at least let me recover the data...the problem is, about 75% of the AVI files are now corrupt and won't play at all. i have tried using AVI Repair, Video Fixer and a few other video repair tools and nothing seems to work...each one of them says that it's not an AVI file.

    does anyone have any ideas? most of that video is real important and since i only had 3 miniDV tapes at the time, i don't have any of that footage backed up --in the past, i would rotate tapes in and out after capturing the video, but now i have over 15 tapes, so it's not a problem.

    thanks for any help...sturmie
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  2. Member flaninacupboard's Avatar
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    wha have you tried doig with the files? what happens if opened in windows media player and virtualdub?
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  3. in WMP, it says that file is either "not an AVI" or it is "corrupt". in VirtualDub, it doesn't recognize it as an AVI.
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  4. *bump* for thoughts.


    thanks.
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  5. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    Hello,
    Why don't you trying copying them to disk and try them on another computer? You may be able to read them that way.

    Also, can you reoutput them to your camera? I don't have a dv camera but this might be an approach. If your original software can recognize it then maybe there salvagable.

    One other thought, have you tried other programs like TMPGenc to see if they can be read? Zoom Player may be an option. This reads many files and may give you a chance. Best of luck.

    Kevin
    P.S. Now you will never forget to backup your files! It's a hard lesson I still try to remind myself about. {I know you said you only had 3 tapes, but you may have been able to split them to cdrs or dvdrs, now's a good time to research that option}
    Donatello - The Shredder? Michelangelo - Maybe all that hardware is for making coleslaw?
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  6. @yoda313

    none the programs i have found can open the files...WMP, Premiere, AVI Repair, etc. also, i have copied them to other machine(s) and to an external drive...same results on other PCs.

    now that i have 13 tapes, there isn't a need to research the split DVD-R option...but yes, i was working on backing them up to DVD right before the drive went haywire.
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  7. i know it's been a couple years, but does anyone have any suggestions as to how to repair a corrupt DV AVI? yes, i still held on to a few of the really important ones hoping the technology would get good enough to fix them.

    btw, i just tried to open one of them in VirtualDub 1.8.8 and got an error message of "Invalid AVI file: the main 'movi' block is missing".
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  8. Member
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    EDIT: Considering your problem might be a lot simpler than it seems, I've remembered some stuff about VirtualDUB. You should try File->Open and check the "Advanced options". Play with the options given, for example, "Compatibility mode", and it might actually open the file. If this works, you don't even need to read the rest of this message.

    As far as I know, there are two video players good at playing seriously damaged files:
    www.videolan.org/vlc/
    www.mplayerhq.hu/
    Each one has played a file for me which the other one fails to play. If neither work, none will.

    Now, about repairing. For anybody to help you, this information can be useful:
    A screenshot from GSpot. www.headbands.com/gspot/
    A screenshot from AVIEdit Edit->Info. www.am-soft.ru/
    Hex dump of the first thousand bytes. I believe Notepad++ has a hex editor.

    Take a look in the hex editor at the file. Near the beginning you should see "hdrlavih". http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Microsoft_Audio/Video_Interleaved After that you should see scattered a bunch of "strlstrh". Them some crap might follow, and then you should see the "movi" string. According to VirtualDUB, there is none, but VirtualDUB works in mysterious ways, the chunk might be there, damaged. Scroll down a few to loads of pages. Do you see parts filled with zeros or otherwise inconsistent with the rest of the video?

    P.S. I believe there are costly services which will get all the possible data out of your damaged files. If those files are really important, be sure to consider that.
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