Corrupt VRO file to Mac HD

[Nathan_H]

Hi there,

Apologies in advance if this has been asked before.

I have some old camcorder footage on DVD-RAM media. The discs can be taken out of their cartridge housing and my Panasonic burner reads the discs. For all but one of the discs, I have copied over the VRO files and renamed them to MPG. This loses the timing and chapter information but I’m OK with that as at least they are not further compressed and I will be editing them anyway. However, I have one disc where the VRO is corrupt to a point. The file gets to the end of being copied to the Mac but fails just shy of the last few MBs saying the file could not be read. The file will play in the camcorder but glitches at the end of playback. I could get a capture cable/device to feed the camcorder through I guess but I didn’t really want to compress further and it’s only going to be for this disc so I was wondering if there was a way to copy the file somehow without doing this? I’ve seen Windows solutions bantered around that can copy over as much of a video file that can be read but nothing for Mac. Also the examples I’ve seen are for DVD files and not VRO so I’m not sure that whey would work anyway. Anyone have any experience of this or have any ideas of possible solutions?

The video features family members who are no longer with us so I want to preserve it and the quality as much as possible.

[usually_quiet]

If VLC can play the VRO file, you may be able to use the record button to copy the video from the DVD-RAM disc to an mpg file up to the point where the corruption begins. The video and audio are recorded from the disc as-is. They won't be re-encoded.

I have used ISOBuster free (sorry, only for Windows) to recover video from DVD-RAM discs as TAO files, which I renamed with an mpg extension and edited. ISOBuster free will likely be able to copy the file up to the point where it becomes corrupt.

[Nathan_H]

usually_quiet , you are a legend!

VCL didn’t play the file but I had ISOBuster Pro already. I had used it before to recover files on an old hard drive which I ran under Windows as a VM through Parallels on the Mac. I didn’t think to use this as I thought it would only recover deleted files and I didn’t really want to reinstall Parallels again. However, I did and sure enough it worked. Took ages but it got there. In fact, it was even better than I expected as it allowed me to extract each chapter as an individual video file rather than the whole video as one.

Thank you. I really appreciate the help.