.MOV home movies - some not working. Invalid public movie atom. Corrupted?

[marcate]

I'm pretty freaked out at the prospect of losing all of these precious videos of my kids as babies!!!! They were copied to 2 external hard drives for storage. Some are fine, some are not. For instance, out of 9 videos taken on the same day by the same digital camera, 2 work and 7 do not. The ones that work have a preview icon from my movie, and the ones that do not work have a Quicktime film strip icon.

When I double-click, I get this:

"The movie could not be opened.

An invalid public movie atom was found in the movie."

They are from 2004. I tried copying to my hard drive and changing the extension to .mp4, .m4v, and .3gp. Nothing works.

I tried downloading VLC, and that did not work, either.

Are these files corrupted somehow???? If so, can they be recovered???? Do I contact a place like Aero Quartet, which I found when doing a search????

Any help is greatly appreciated... these are irreplaceable memories...

[Soopafresh]

Perhaps not all is lost

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2677/quicktime_invalid_public_movie_atom_was_found_in_the_movie