Unable to repair gopro mp4 videos

[kevinweg]

Hi,
Went on a motorcycle trip of a lifetime and found out a bit late that my gopro stopped recording good files after day 5 of 2 weeks. I've spent the past few days trying to figure out ways to recover these videos but nothing has worked so far. I have seen threads in this forum and tried virtually every tool using windows, command prompt and linux (I don't have a mac), nothing seems to work. Atomicparsley even fails when i try to dump header information. It says "ftype atom missing or alignment error". Because of that, I grabbed a hex editor to look at the files. It appears all the corrupt files have 0xFF encoded. I think these videos are toast.

So, I have two questions:
1) Given what I just said, I have to assume my conclusion is correct (those videos are toast)
2) Why would something like a gopro write files of 0xFF? Many of these files are many megabits (some are gigabits). I was expecting to see that the header information was corrupted (due to a bad shutdown or something) not all 0xFF. The fact that the files exist tells me the gopro wrote something but all 0xFF? Even Jack Torrance did better than this on his novel in the shining.

Any thoughts?
Appreciate expert insight.
Thank you!

[Krispy Kritter]

Likely isn't anything to "repair". The GoPro was likely writing gibberish or the storage media is faulty.