Require some help restoring MJPEG/AVI files after recovery (Newbie)

[Crimson66]

Hi All,
Long story short, Had lots of video files on SD card's and for one reason or another they were not on the SD cards anymore (deleted) Tried recovering the videos using a plethora of recovery programmes, Recuva, CnW Recovery etc and out of about 60+ videos there were 4-5 that were Pristine, fully recovered not a problem. There were many more that were "Fully recovered" as Recuva said they were 'Perfect' and the rest were a mix of 'Poor' and 'Unrecoverable'. So I have recovered everything I can (Perfect, poor and Unrecoverable) yet some of the 'Perfect' videos will not play in any media player VLC, WMP,VSO Media player, SMPlayer. So I googled some stuff and found that it may be the Headers that were missing. So I downloaded HxD and viewed some of the files that were not playing and sure enough some Headers were missing. So I did as many people said on line (made copies of everything first and worked on the copies) and I Transferred the header from one of the working videos into the Non working videos and it did help slightly as now some of the videos play selective 'Stills' with very loud screechy audio in the back ground but do not play the video fully.
All the videos will be around 10 mins long as the camera I was using was set to cut into 10 min chunks.

I have tried multiple repair softwares such as Remo,Veedub (this one just doesn't see most of the videos and comes up with errors from the start when I drag and drop into it). Avidemux 2.7, divFix, FFMPEG and I just seem to be getting nowhere fast.


If required I can upload screen shots and give more information if anyone is able to help but I will not be able to send any files (personal which is why I want them back)


I upload some to the site MP4Repair.org which is why I know that they are MJPEG files and the guys there did say that they were able to fix the one I uploaded to them but the hefty price for 60+ videos would be way out of my price range.


If anyone could help or even point me in a direction then I would be very greatful.


Thankyou All

[pandy]

You may try ffmpeg with aggressive error settings (by aggressive i mean lack of any control - garbage is accepted as valid data) however i don't know what you mean by header - there is many headers some of them can be related to every video frame. You should try to understand problem from video decoder perspective - error recovery, resilience, concealment - they are usually tightly coupled and highly depends on decoder non standard features (so you need to be aware what kind of decoder you use to decode your data - plenty of programs using same decoder and as such they are usually similar on decoded data delivered).

Unless special packet exist then probably you are on bad position here - if substantial amount pages from book is ripped and burned then whole book may be unreadable (those readable pages will not give book)...

[Crimson66]

You may try ffmpeg with aggressive error settings (by aggressive i mean lack of any control - garbage is accepted as valid data) however i don't know what you mean by header - there is many headers some of them can be related to every video frame. You should try to understand problem from video decoder perspective - error recovery, resilience, concealment - they are usually tightly coupled and highly depends on decoder non standard features (so you need to be aware what kind of decoder you use to decode your data - plenty of programs using same decoder and as such they are usually similar on decoded data delivered).

Unless special packet exist then probably you are on bad position here - if substantial amount pages from book is ripped and burned then whole book may be unreadable (those readable pages will not give book)...

How would I go about doing this aggressive mode? ive just been doing what a video said online "FFmpeg -I vid1.avi vid1fixed.avi" etc

[Bernix]

As MJPEG is I frames only codecs (it means each frame is fully described and do not depend on other frames), I think it shouldn't be problem to repair it, if is it possible. But probably there is some not only I frames version of MJPEG, that I don't know, and thing is more complicated.
Players you mentioned shouldn't have problem with MJPEG, you can also try popular Potplayer, but don't think it really helps.
Also you can try open it in virtualdub, but don't think it will help much eighter.
Conclusion, where recurva shows green next to file (perfect) those files should be 100% recoverable. But problem can also be they were wrong when writing to sd card.


And what happened when you try remux avi to mkv in mkvtoolnix? I think you got plenty of errors, but probably can somehow helps.



Bernix

[pandy]

How would I go about doing this aggressive mode? ive just been doing what a video said online "FFmpeg -I vid1.avi vid1fixed.avi" etc

At first you can try to copy your source with some ffmpeg work to same video/audio/container format:

ffmpeg -err_detect ignore_err -i your_video.avi -c copy your_video_fix.avi

Way how you did conversion was suboptimal - first error flag was set to default and some data potentially useful can be skipped, secondly you din't copy your file but instead default video encoder was used to re-encode video - this is not bad however you didn't provided any additional settings so bitrate or quality may be not as good as possible.

If first command line will not work then perhaps second can be better - you need to try - i will wrote this command-line without checking so you must do test by yourself - i assume that audio and video will be losslessly compressed (as such result can be substantially bigger than a source), why losslessly? i do not go now into details related to target codec etc - hope huffyuv and flac within mkv container is supported by your system.

ffmpeg -err_detect ignore_err -ec +guess_mvs+deblock+favor_inter -i your_video.avi -c:v huffyuv -c:a? flac your_video_fix.mkv

[Budman1]

Do you have a sample you could upload to better understand the full problen?

[divo2000]

If anyone could help or even point me in a direction then I would be very greatful.

Recuva and other undelete tools are mostly no use when it comes to videos - because of fragmentation. Some undelete tools recover data using a RAW method, which means these tools scan physical sectors searching for known headers, totally ignoring the file system (and restored files would contain lots of junk data, like parts of deleted videos, even if the file size seems to be correct). This method works only when there is no fragmentation, and this is often not the case when speaking of videos.

I would try running your files withhttps://restore.media/ online tool - it's an updated tool of recover_mp4. I guess the principle is the same as MP4Repair.org (you upload a reference file, then the corrupted file, and this is it). But given that you have lots of damaged files, I would rather make an image file of your SD card and give it to some repair service to restore everything directly from there. Maybe MP4Repair does it (didnt use it), I only know Restore.Media does. But if you haven't formatted your SD card for a long time, this might not help, as in this case there will be lots of fragments, all mixed together, and it would be like really really hard to put the right ones together.