MTS file recovery help

[HLed1]

Hello all, first time posting here. Spent hours reading topics but could not find the solution I need.

Here is my problem:
I have a Canon camcorder w/built in HD. There was a couple of videos shot, and played back fine. Unfortunatly some idiot (me) hit the delete button on the two vids, before realizing I was deleting the wrong ones. So off to the net I went, and paid for a file recovery program (one time use).
I recovered the two .MTS files, 148 MB and 350 MB respectivly. My problem is no matter how I try to open or view these files, nothing but errors happens. Even tried vidioLAN, and uploading them to youtube. The youtube uploads came back with errors for missing codecs and unknow header information.
I have packed the camcorder away so there is no chance of overwriting the HD with a new video.

Any ideas out there?

Thanks in advance!

[redwudz]

The header info may be damaged. You might be able to open them in a hex editor and see if there is anything in the files or if it's just the header that's damaged. A lot of zeros in the body of the file is bad news.

I've used the VirtualDub hex editor before, but not sure if it can open those type of files. If you can open them, and the header is missing, you might be able to substitute a header from a similar camcorder file. Never tried that, but maybe...

And welcome to our forums.

[HLed1]

Thanks for the reply
I have used a few hex editors, and I think I can navigate around the core data OK. I was hoping for an "easy" fix for this, but if its manual modification of the files so be it.
I did take a peek at the file integrety, looks like everything is there but I did not want to muck around and damage anything. My background is OS's and higher level programming, so 1's and 0's do not usually pass my desk. FWI, I was an administrator to a site structured similar to this, dealing with Malware removal so I do have a bit of a background in computers and the associated problems.

So as I understand it, no tools available to convert raw data in this format?

[aedipuss]

can you host the smaller broken file online? i'd give it a repair try. some hosting sites allow larger files like http://www.filedropper.com/

i have some time before the match starts today i may be a bit useless after....