Old .avi has NO video track at all anymore

[Falconeer]

I am not sure this belongs here so sorry if I am in the wrong section.

I uploaded some old .avi files to my Amazon Cloud years ago. They were old captures of Skype video chats and they were low quality and I remember clearly that they used to have synchronization issues but the video was clearly there, no doubt about it.

Now there is no video anymore, meaning that they play no problem with all the most common players, but there is only audio, as if they were audio tracks.

I used Gspot to figure out if it was a codec issue and I got no results at all for video, as if there were no video tracks in there at all. Then I used Remo Repair and it returned me an error saying it cannot fetch A/V informations.

At this point I am ready to accept that they got permenanetly corrupted, but how, how is that even possible? I mean, how could some files stored on an Amazon Cloud get "surgically" corrupted, in a way that literally stripped the video track out of an .avi?

I am at a loss, and quite desperate. These videos were important. Any help would be infinitely appreciated.

[aedipuss]

you'd have to upload 1 of them here for us to examine. they can be up to 500MB on this site.

[jagabo]

The entire video track doesn't have to get stripped, only the header information has to be corrupted. Though multiple files getting corrupted exactly the same way is unlikely. As aedipuss indicated, providing a sample may allow us to analyze what's wrong.

[Cornucopia]

Also, gspot hasn't been updated in a decade. Very well may not have full list of codecs (even then). Better to use mediainfo.

Scott

[themaster1]

You can reconstrust the missing header with virtualdub i believe

[jagabo]

VirtualDub can reconstruct a missing keyframe index but not a missing header. If it manages to open an AVI file with a corrupt header saving it in Video -> Direct Stream Copy mode should create a new fixed file.