If anyone can fix this 3gp video file, I'll pay em £15 (via PayPal)

[prupert]

Hi

I know this is an odd first post, but I would love some help. I just took a video of my 4 month old baby daughter laughing for literally the second time in her life. Sadly, as I stopped the video, the application died. It was recorded on an HTC Hero mobile phone, running RaduG's VanillaEclair 2.1 Android OS, which uses the default Android Camera / Video Camera. Sadly, when I try to access the file, it doesn't work, and FFmpeg says: [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x9b26510]error reading header: -1

Anyway, since this is the first video of her laughing, I would LOVE to get it working.

I am genuinely willing to pay £15 via PayPal to anyone you can get this video working and sends it back to me (you can send me just a short 5 second clip to prove you got it working and I'll send over the money - since I know this all sounds a bit dodgey).

I hope this isn't against any rules, but I am desperate to get this video fixed. From what I have read, it is probobly impossible, but hey, I thought the promise of money might make miracles happen.

The file is here:

http://hotfile.com/dl/51657102/6a362ba/lily.3gp.html

Grr - Google Docs not working, so new link given.
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_kveCquuipKOWNhMTljMmUtMWJlYi00NDU5LThmMTQtZGJkN2YwZ...thkey=CKOo78QP

Cheers!

[hech54]

No luck with any of my software.

[classfour]

No joy - sorry.

[prupert]

Thanks for trying people - I am pretty sure the video is a dub, but I thought I should see if someone had some magic beans

[video_magic]

I am working on it, I don't want anything for doing it, no promises on whether it is totally recoverable either!

[prupert]

That's her!! Wow, awesomeness.

If you can fix it, I am more than happy to pay (and I can work on a sliding scale of recoverability).

It'd also be interesting to know what you did to even get one image out of it....

[video_magic]

I will share with you what I managed to get very limited success with, but unfortunately I have got no further despite a lot of trying.

I used Mplayer/Mencoder, this is something you normally use from a 'command prompt' i.e. a dos prompt window in Windows.
http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php

The command I got some success with (you put this in notepad and save (with the extension .bat instead of .txt) to the folder where you have the mencoder and mplayer files) is:

mencoder d:\capster\Copyoflily.3gp -nosound -ovc copy -of rawvideo -ofps 6 -ffourcc s263 -noskip -o d:\capster\ANL\lily6.263

You can try installing and using the free ffdshow-tryouts which has many decoders.

Other than that I am unable to make any more progress tonight, hope that helps make some progress and good luck.

[video_magic]

One more snap managed to get from the video.

[video_magic]

I've just spent a bit more time on it. Here is a better pic. Unfortunately it looks like it is just about possible to get about 1 minute 47 seconds (only vaguely accurate as your original video is variable framerate (vfr)), however only a few frames out of that recovered segment are actually decodeable.

[video_magic]

Anyway, one more post to say I would very much have liked to get you a few snaps of her laughing too, which I know is the subject of the video, but all of the frames are corrupted - this is the best I could get - I'll attatch one snap here so you at least have something of a souvenier of that moment, best of luck.

[lowellriggsiam]

Boy this has got me facinated. Here's a few pics I've collected from the stream.

[prupert]

Thanks very much for all your effort video_magic you got way further than me. I'm fairly familiar with the command line in Linux and use FFmpeg quite a lot - sadly I don't know much about how to use the tools to rescue files, just to convert them.

Also, thanks for the efforts lowellriggsiam, if you get any further, I am all ears (and eyes)

[video_magic]

prupert, you are welcome. I reached the limits of my only basic knowledge of those kind of programs, hope an expert reads this thread and can do more.

lowellriggsiam, those 2 frame pics look better than I managed to retrieve, are they raw-frame snaps? or are they 'post-processed' in any way!?