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  1. Member
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    Greetings and thanks for reading my post,

    While searching for a solution for my problem, I came across this website and the forum seemed to contain a lot of good solutions. The solution to my problem wasn't yet there, so I am hoping you could take a look at it.

    Some time ago I downloaded 7 seasons from a tv series from a public files host (purchased a premium account for it!). When I got around to watching season 5, the first episode wouldn't play in WMP v10.0 and WMP v11.0 (on WinXP SP2). It displayed an error and translated from Dutch, it was something like this:

    "Cannot play file. Probably, the player doesn't support this filetype or it doesn't support the codec used to create this file."

    In Windows XP explorer, the file shows no information on the length (other files from the same batch do, Ill tell more about this)

    I tried opening it in VirtualDubMod v1.5.10.x, but it said:

    "Cannot detect file type of 'C:\file.avi' "

    VLC media player displays no error while opening the file, but doesn't play anything (no video/sound)

    MediaInfo is only able to display the file name and the file size

    GSPOT v2.70 however (and this gives me hope) is able to derive information:

    Frames: 60,900
    Len:42:05:89
    kbps 1182
    pic: 640 x352

    No information on the video codec ("Codec Status Undetermined") but:
    Name:MPEG 4

    No information on the audio.

    There is some more information but I don't know exactly if that is relevant.

    Other files from the same batch (the same season:P) work, and they are encoded using the same codec ( XVid), also the pic size, the number of frames and the video length seem to correspond. Also they all share the same nomenclature.

    I hope that you have a solution that allows me to fix the file. It seems to me that everything is there, and there should be a way to recover video and the audio from this file and use it to build a new file? Maybe by using codec information from the other files, as they must share some kind of relation ...

    I know very little of video encoding so I was hoping you could explain the problem if you know what causes it (cause Im curious what it is) as well as the solution in layman terms

    Thanks in advance!

    Regards,
    wazuk
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  2. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    VLC can play most anything, even damaged files. If it can't open it, there may not be much hope. What you may have is a blank file, but the headers that show the file type and length, etc., are still there. Sort of like a book with a index, but blank pages.

    You can try opening the file in MS Notepad, but it may take a long, long time to open. Make a very short clip of one of the other files and try to open that also in notepad. Then compare the text. It's mostly just code, but you may see the difference between a working file and one that has no data in the body of the file. Or just has corrupted data.

    But I wouldn't hold out much hope of recovering anything.

    Others here may have some ideas, though.

    And welcome to our forums.
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  3. Try using VirtualDub's hex editor rather than Notepad. AVI files have very distinctive headers. I suspect the header is messed up. Did GSpot say the container was AVI/OpenDML?
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  4. Member
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    @ redwudz: I was also fearing that there wasn't much hope for my file as the much praised VLC player wasn't able to open it Thanks for you welcome

    @ jagabo: The missing header idea didn't cross my mind, but now you mentioned it I looked up some threads on this forum and found one describing missing header symptoms that are the same as my problem, while at the same time showing steps on how to fix it. So thanks for thinking with me!

    I will compare the first parts of this corrupt file and two good files with virtual dub hex editor to find out if it's a missing header problem. If so I will try and fix it with the solution proposed in this thread:

    https://forum.videohelp.com/topic293355.html

    I will get back to show you how it went
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  5. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    Thanks jagabo, for the tip about the VD hex editor. I have never used it. (And probably wouldn't understand the information anyway. ) It seems there is always more to learn about VD.
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  6. One really nice thing about VirtualDub's hex editor is it's RIFF chunk tree view. I wish it went one step further and showed the individual fields in the AVI header, the stream headers, and the ODML header. As it is you have to have a reference handy and count the bytes.
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