Revive broken, "corrupt" video? Retrieve anything at all?

[coffeecup-sf]

How is movie file "data"? Is it retrievable to some extent or ultra sensitive? Say you have a 100 mb video either in mpg or avi. You accidently corrupt the file a bit, or say you use a file splitter and chop it up into 10mb sections. Then you lose one or a few of the sections, but the other parts still exist. The remaining that you have left over obviously won't play straight in media player. You might get mixed or very poor results in VLC Lan Player, or a crash and error message. Maybe the remainder of the file is very chopped up. Obviously video data is very sensitive for straight play in media player, is there software and/or techniques allowing you to go in and analyze remaining video data? Even if you can't get playback, techniques to maybe go in and at least get snapshots / stills from it? Software names appreciated.

[Abond]

VDubMod or Avidemux2