.AVI Playback Issues

[Moomoo2]

Hi all,

I found an old folder of video from 2008. I vaguely remember authoring a DVD with these video files. I can't find the original source video, though, so I am hoping to work with... Whatever it is that I've found.

Some files have the file extension .avi and open in VLC. Windows Explorer indicate the video length is 50 minutes but when open in VLC it's only about 20 minutes. Most of the files, however, will not open in VLC and do not show video length in Windows Explorer.

Some files have the file extensions .001 and .002.

Most of the files are 3.90 gb in size.

I opened one of the files that play in VLC in VirtualDub and got the following warning:

"AVI: Index not found or damaged -- reconstruction via file scan.
AVI: Keyframe flag reconstruction was not specified in open options and the video stream is not a known keyframe-only type. Seeking in the video stream may be extremely slow."

Also including a screenshot of what I got when I opened the file in Gspot.

Not sure what next steps would be here. Would love to recover this video / make it playable.

Thank you,
Moomoo2

[ProWo]

post a Mediainfo report from one avi here

[Moomoo2]

[Attachment 54984 - Click to enlarge]

Mediainfo attached

[ProWo]

Try to remux with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg.exe -i "input.avi" -c copy "output.mkv"

You can also try to join the avi chunks (001, 002) with Easy Video Joiner https://qpdownload.com/easy-video-joiner/

[Moomoo2]

Hi ProWo,

Thanks for looking at this. Remux works on the files that previously could play, outputting ~20 minute long video files.

The rest of the files (.001, .002) will not open so I am not sure Easy Video Joiner will help. I uses Mediainfo on one of the files that doesn't play... Image attached.

DV-dif? Can these be recovered?

Moomoo2

[manono]

Install a DV codec. Probably Cedocida is best.

[Moomoo2]

Thanks. Installed Cedocida and tried playing in VLC. No luck.

[Cornucopia]

What was the original app that you captured these files with?

I have seen these .001, .002... type files before, but it has probably been 15 years, so don't remember the app now.
That'll probably lead you to which codec (Canopus?) and possibly tool (Canopus?) that can piece them back together FIRST before decoding.

Scott

[johnmeyer]

I'm pretty sure that the 001 extension indicates that the file was captured but never combined with the other files. That is why you are getting the prompt to reindex the file. I would make a copy of the 001 files, rename them to AVI, reindex, and then combine in your favorite NLE (or VirtualDub). I doubt that you need to install an y new codecs because that is almost certainly not your problem.

[abolibibelot]

I have seen these .001, .002... type files before, but it has probably been 15 years, so don't remember the app now.

It was probably some file splitter like File Splitter & Joiner or Xtremsplit or Master Splitter or whatever (these are the few I still have in my software archive from the distant era of the mid-to-late 2000s).
A simple copy /B command should get the same result.

copy /B "input.001"+"input.002"+"input.003" "output.avi"

But there may be an actual 4GB size limit inherent to the AVI specifications, so simply joining such big chunks may not work. In which case I don't know what could make sense of these “spanned” AVI files (perhaps a Web search with those keywords would bring some useful hits).

By the way, I just found out recently (while reporting an issue with the data recovery software R-Studio specifically related to the “raw” recovery of AVI files) that AVI files have a size field at the very beginning of their header. So if you open an AVI file in a hexadecimal editor you should see something like this :

5249464644E31C2D415649204C495354
7E0100006864726C6176696838000000
409C0000000000000000000010090000
17FD0100000000000200000000000000
20020000900100000000000000000000
00000000000000004C495354C0000000

At the beginning is the “RIFF” signature, then at offset +4 there's a 4 bytes field which is here : 44 E3 1C 2D ; read in “little endian” and translated to decimal, this means that the file has a size of 756867908 bytes. In this case it would be interesting to see what size is indicated in the header of those files, and if the .002+ files start with a regular header, or random video data, or a specific header with a reference to the other parts of the same video.

[Cornucopia]

No, abolibibelot, it was NOT a file splitter app. It was from a capture app. Remember, in the early days of DV, the AVI spec was still v1.0, not OpenDML 2.0 style (and was also primarily Type1, not Type2). That meant it couldn't grow larger than 4GB. So a 1hr tape (=~13GB) would have to be captured and saved as segments to get around that limitation.

Scott