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  1. Member
    Join Date
    Sep 2018
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    Italy
    Search Comp PM
    Hello everyone, I am a total newbie on these issues.

    I played a backgammon live tournament this weekend, and I recorded with an Apeman Action Cam Full HD 1080P just purchased all my matches (about 5/6 hours) on a Micro SDHC 32GB memory card class 10 in order to review and analyze my matches later with backgammon professional software.

    My camera is set to low resolution (VGA) with cycles of 25 minutes, so I have now on my card 13 MOV files each of about 800MB size.

    Unfortunately, it appears that the first 5 video files are working correctly, but from the 6th on the video files are not readable/corrupted.

    I tried last night to repair the files with Stellar Phoenix Video Repeair software. The software says to have repaired the file and gave me hope but when I tried to open them they still don’t work/appear to be corrupted.

    Do you think there is anything else I can do? I guess the problem can be the memory card that is damaged?

    Please help! Recovering these files is extremely important to me.

    Thanks,
    melzino
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  2. Member Krispy Kritter's Avatar
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    Jul 2003
    Location
    St Louis, MO USA
    Search Comp PM
    Try opening the files with MediaInfo ( https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo ) and see if they are being recognized.

    You could also try playing the files using VLC. VLC can usually play even damaged files.

    If they aren't recognized and won't play with VLC, they are very likely not salvageable.
    Google is your Friend
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  3. If you've got first 5 videos playable, then you can easily repair the last files with any software that recovers metadata, e.g. recover_mp4 or its updated version at https://restore.media

    Sometimes though the memory card might be damaged, in this case you can make an image file of that card (if you haven't overwritten it yet) and analyze it with restore.media service or any similar. The worst variant is when memory card dies, and the files are filled with zeros in this case. In this case only they are unrecoverable, but let's hope you the above tools will help you.
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  4. Member
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    Sep 2018
    Location
    Italy
    Search Comp PM
    Thank you for the Restore.Media tip, it seems like a great service! I have tried with automatic recovery but failed, currently waiting on manual intervention by a Restore.Media engineer.

    Do you have any idea of the prices for automatic recovery and manual intervention? Cound't fint it online.

    Thanks,
    Carlo
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  5. Member
    Join Date
    Aug 2010
    Location
    San Francisco, California
    Search PM
    The prices are generally higher than anyone wants to pay, because when they get to this stage, they are in some measure desperate to recover their videos. I would definitely advise negotiating the price instead of accepting whatever Restore demands.

    I don't know if you did it this time, but in the future, make a full image backup of your memory card before you attempt any operation. Unsuccessful repair passes can make things worse.
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  6. It's very likely that you have a couterfeit SD card, which has a displayed size of 32GB but is actually 4GB (5 x 800MB), and the controler is set to provide a false information. If the files are still on the card, you can open it with a hexadecimal editor, WinHex for instance, and see what the corrupted files look like : they will probably be empty / filled with 00s. If the card has been emptied, you can test it, either manually, by copying a 1GB file repeatedly and checking its MD5 checksum : if it's indeed a counterfeit 4GB card, the first 4 copies will be correct, but all copied beyond that will be corrupted ; or you can test it with a specific tool like H2testw.
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  7. Originally Posted by melzino View Post
    Thank you for the Restore.Media tip, it seems like a great service! I have tried with automatic recovery but failed, currently waiting on manual intervention by a Restore.Media engineer. Do you have any idea of the prices for automatic recovery and manual intervention? Cound't fint it online.
    Sorry, didn't see the message earlier. Yep, Restore.Media is a great service, I turn to them when nothing else works. And if it's unrecoverable, they will at least tell you why (if you write to them/request manuel recovery), so that you don't waste your time anymore. As to the pricing - not sure about the entire range, sometimes they fix files manually at no additional charge at all (if it's something like re-processing the automatic recovery the right way), sometimes charge like $3-5 extra to the automatic recovery. When it comes to manual recovery of a bunch of files (or a recovery through an image file of corrupt SD card), I was told that it depends on the amount of data. For my SD (size 64 GB), it came to exactly $64, everything perfectly fixed, with manual tweaking and all. I even tried to negotiate with their support But if they can't repair - most probably nobody can and it's unrepairable, so it's like a last resort trying to fix through them.
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