Video nightmare, Cannot open .mp4, please help.

[airrore]

(Not sure if this is in the right section, moderator feel free to move it elsewhere.)

I am getting pretty desperate for help, long story short: I have a video nightmare on my hands and I messed up... bigtime... and have learned several lessons (and probably more to come.) I could really use some help from some kind souls...

Short story long and I apologize for the length: I was asked to film a friend's wedding a few weeks ago. I told him I would and if he rented a camera, I would come up with all the other material and do it free of charge. (I'm more of a audio guy, so I had the audio equipment available.) I told him so long as it was HD and had an XLR input, we'd be OK. He rented this. (Nice cam.) He wasn't necessarily looking for a whole production, just something that the bride's grandmother (who was unable to attend) could watch.

Anyways, the wedding was in his hometown, a few hours away from me. I get there plenty early, did all my setup, run all my audio cabling and whatnot. I am about half an hour from showtime. I open the bag and discover that not only does this model not have an AC adapter for the camera (or the rental place did not include one) but the battery was almost totally dead. (It had a charger, though.) I went into panic mode, put a new flash disk in, did a test recording, quickly looked through settings and took the battery out to charge. I did not do any formatting of the card because I was afraid of losing battery life and everything seemed OK. (Also, I thought flash disks come preformatted? Am I wrong to assume this?) I got the battery back out with less than a minute before showtime and managed to get through the whole ceremony with 2 minutes of battery life left. (Close call!)

I get the disk back to my computer (which I brought with me) and it says "disk not formatted, click OK to format" so I click cancel in horror. I decide not to bother anyone with this in the wedding party, packed the camera up and took the disk home.

Called the groom later that week, explained the situation, he was understanding and pissed at the rental place because they "swore they charged the battery before he took it, etc." Anyways, this is a brand new disk... and they offered to take a look at the flash disk and managed to extract a file off of it in .mp4 format which ended up being 70 MB. (Which seems reasonable for a 20 minute ceremony.) Here's the problem... they couldn't open the file and I can't either. I tried opening in multiple versions of quicktime, VLC player, browsers, basically anything I could think of with no results. I am sort of listless at this point. I didn't know if anyone had any suggestions.

Here's a link to the file. Any help would be greatly appreciated it. I feel terrible putting the family through this! I learned a valuable lesson though, always format your card and charge battery first!

[poisondeathray]

and managed to extract a file off of it in .mp4 format which ended up being 70 MB. (Which seems reasonable for a 20 minute ceremony.)

Sorry to break the news, but even if could recover it 100% of that fragment, 70MB would be about <20 seconds of video if you were recording in the highest quality mode (35Mb/s)

[budwzr]

How did you record the event if the SD card was bad?

[airrore]

and managed to extract a file off of it in .mp4 format which ended up being 70 MB. (Which seems reasonable for a 20 minute ceremony.)

Sorry to break the news, but even if could recover it 100% of that fragment, 70MB would be about <20 seconds of video if you were recording in the highest quality mode (35Mb/s)

Really? I assumed that because it was mp4 instead of mov, it was doing some sort of compression.

[airrore]

How did you record the event if the SD card was bad?

I had no indication that it was bad or even unformatted. After I inserted the card, the cam showed that there was storage and it allowed me to record (well, or at least showed on the display, that it was recording.) Any other circumstance with any other camera/device, I have always received a sort of prompt that the card needs to be formatted or is unable to function until a format... you know, except this time when it counted...

[poisondeathray]

and managed to extract a file off of it in .mp4 format which ended up being 70 MB. (Which seems reasonable for a 20 minute ceremony.)

Sorry to break the news, but even if could recover it 100% of that fragment, 70MB would be about <20 seconds of video if you were recording in the highest quality mode (35Mb/s)

Really? I assumed that because it was mp4 instead of mov, it was doing some sort of compression.

That is compressed with the native recording compression. "MP4" or "MOV" does not indicate what compression was used, they are just containers

If you recorded with an external recorder to uncompressed 4:2:0 , 70MB would be less than 1 second . Uncompressed 4:2:2 would even be shorter

[lowellriggsiam]

The file is heavily damaged. So far I have managed to extract a few pictures.

[lowellriggsiam]

The MP4 file contains an mpeg2 video stream and 4 sequence headers. Frame size 1280x720 Aspect Ratio 16:9 Bitrate 87500.

[budwzr]

How did you record the event if the SD card was bad?

I had no indication that it was bad or even unformatted. After I inserted the card, the cam showed that there was storage and it allowed me to record (well, or at least showed on the display, that it was recording.) Any other circumstance with any other camera/device, I have always received a sort of prompt that the card needs to be formatted or is unable to function until a format... you know, except this time when it counted...

OK, what probably happened is somebody tried to format the card, AFTER recording, and then stopped it by pulling the card out, thereby corrupting the FAT, and the only thing recoverable was that fragment.

Too bad you didn't use a Flip, the memory is built in and with the FlipShare software, it's almost impossible to get rid of a video permanently, even if you want to.

[lowellriggsiam]

I have managed to extract approximately 15 seconds of video. It plays in VLC (no sound). Pending proof I assume that it is the entire file. Is this from your "quick test"?

[vhelp]

the file plays fine in kmplayer v3.0.0.1439 build 1439, although it seems to be the only thing that will play this corrupt file. the bitstream seems to be missing some information from the startup section inside the stream. however, since running through dgavc throws the following error message, "pic_order_cnt_type !=1" i suspect it has something to do with that, and all you would have to do is re-insert the hex values to include that. or, the file was so corrupted around the area the most "decoders" read to determine what container it is and decodes it, i.e., avc vs mpeg2, and so on. but, kmplayer seems to realize how to handle this situation and compensates for it and plays the entire file. i suspect it will play your complete corruted file.

dealing with corrupted a/v files, my near fail-proof recipe to resolve. . .

in situations like this, the first thing you want to do is run the culprit file through the following tools. they each have their unique way of loading a source video/audio file. i use this recipe anytime i have a file i need to analize or problem file i need to get open and/or de/re-mux into a new container:

nero showtime4 v4.3.2.0 -- plays it fine
vlc v0.8.5 -- will not play it
kmplayer 3.0.0.1439 --- plays it fine
mplayer v1.0pre7-3.4.2 -- plays it fine
avisynth plug-in ffms2.dll --> FFVideoSource(x) -- will not play it
ffmpeg via -vcodec copy -- will not demux the video from it
dgindex v1.0.7 -- will not play it or demux it
dgindex v1.5.2 -- plays it fine, and demuxes it perfectly, to its actual source .m2v (mpeg-2) file.

next, once you've found your tool to load, run it through to edit or demux out its original container, in this case, we discovered it was dgindex v1.5.2 (see the tools download section) with the following steps:

1. i would download and use dgindex v1.5.2
2. open dgindex, and load and run the corruped file through it
3. go to meu bar, \file\save project and demux video\filename.m2v
4. remux into a new container if necessary with yamb, txMuxGUI, mp4Muxer, etc.
5. . . .

steps 1-3 will get you the original source file
steps 4 onward.., from there, do what your project requires.

General
Complete name                    : G:\video1_dgavc.demuxed.m2v
Format                           : MPEG Video
Format version                   : Version 2
File size                        : 69.6 MiB
Duration                         : 16s 140ms
Overall bit rate                 : 36.2 Mbps

Video
Format                           : MPEG Video
Format version                   : Version 2
Format profile                   : Main@High
Format settings, BVOP            : Yes
Format settings, Matrix          : Default
Duration                         : 16s 140ms
Bit rate mode                    : Variable
Bit rate                         : 35.0 Mbps
Width                            : 1 280 pixels
Height                           : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio             : 16:9
Frame rate                       : 50.000 fps
Color space                      : YUV
Chroma subsampling               : 4:2:0
Bit depth                        : 8 bits
Compression mode                 : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)               : 0.760
Stream size                      : 66.8 MiB (96%)

note.. avisynth plug-in ffms2.dll --> FFVideoSource(x) -- finally play it fine

x = "g:\video1_dgavc.demuxed.m2v" 
LoadPlugin( "C:\PLUGINS\ffms2.dll" ) 
FFVideoSource(x)

[Bjs]

Contains 16 seconds of video and that's all ...

File loaded and converted via super.

[budwzr]

I found this free undelete utility:

http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

Good luck

[airrore]

Wow, guys. You all are awesome. I wish I could buy you all a round for your time.

That does appear to be from the "test" I took and I bet that 15 seconds was all I tested before I ripped the battery out. (Jesus, the lighting is awful.)

Anyways, I've already spoken with the groom and sort have come to the conclusion that this project is a loss, BUT, in talking to him, it sounds like the guy "recovering the files" is perhaps, even more of a noob than I. The groom said that this was one of the first recovery jobs the guy has done (hooray!) and he "bought his recover software from Staples" so, I sort of wonder if there might be more on the disk, since I did absolutely nothing different the second time during the actual event. The groom is going to get the disk back soon, but so far, we can't do any worse!

But, in the interest of learning another lesson, does anyone know why on earth a camera would allow you to record like this on a unformatted disk? Clearly some information, damaged or not, was written to it...

Once again, thank you all for your time. I linked the groom to this thread and he has been really impressed to find that there are in-fact, kind hearted and altruistic people on the internet, heh.

[lordsmurf]

Furthermore, use good memory cards -- not generic crappy ones. What was it?

The person who "recovered" the video is likely a putz.
If it really is important -- just send it to Ontrack: http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/
I own a copy of OnTrack EasyRecovery Pro -- and it certainly isn't sold at Staples!
I've worked with damaged memory cards before, when it was simply file system damage.

Remember this --
the more you screw around with the card, the more likely you'll lose anything that may be there.

[vhelp]

you know, coensidenally, i recently had a similar experience, last weekend i snapped well over a thousand photos with my canon s5 to a 2gig stick (i use the cameras continous shoot feature to take snaps about every 1/2sec) and after i removed and inserted the disk in my pc's card reader, right after, my itchy fingers to delete the disk started the delete process. unfortunately, i cought the error a little too late and lost the first 122 or so photos. actually, i didn't lose them, they got corrupted, i.e., two photos merged into one, that is, [A] [B] [C] became half [a/b] [b/c] [c/d], ... and or the color levels got screwed up, some photos were so bright or so dark or all green or all blue. i kept the disk and picked up a new 2gig stick. i kept the damaged disk in locked mode so i don't destroy or make worse, in hopes that i might restore those 122 plus photos because every time i extract the photos i get a different result, its strange why this happens though i suspect that undeleting was part of this phenomina. but i'll figure it out some other time when i have time to analize again.

[vhelp]

ok, so a good sleep made me think some more on this..

they offered to take a look at the flash disk and managed to extract a file off of it in .mp4 format which ended up being 70 MB. (Which seems reasonable for a 20 minute ceremony.) Here's the problem... they couldn't open the file and I can't either. I tried opening in multiple versions of quicktime, VLC player, browsers, basically anything I could think of with no results. I am sort of listless at this point. I didn't know if anyone had any suggestions.

it would seem that the file they pulled was possibly one of several short snipplets (taken at the time of shooting video) and not the complete disk content(s) based on what i just re-read above. i would ask, if the demo clip you uploaded for us to review, was that from the 70mb file you mentioned above ?

if so, then i would suspect that the file, (that one) was not damaged, but rather you/they were unfamiliar with opening it with the proper tools. i believe you should be able to load/play that 70mb file just fine inside current or uptodate soffware players, or to edit/review inside a timeline you could load it inside dgindex v1.5.2 and extract the actual mpeg2 video file as i mentioned in my previous reponse above.

it is obvious that the camera saves the video in an mpeg2 HD format. that camera just might have been one example of some of those cameras that don't write cooperative containers for hd. some cameras are known for that.. their containers are hit or miss. and this was probably a good example of this.

now, as far as the remaining file(s) on the disk.. i would inquire, how much do you know was damaged or was the disk actually re-formated or erased. if the disk was erased by the cam then it is a simple process to un-erase it with most (freeware/downloadable) tools. then, later, bring those files into reputable tools that will load/play/edit them.