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!!