I have a DVD Recorder, it sometimes messes up its recordings at the postprocessing stage and the recording ends up missing...

I am posting this because it might help someone who's looking for another DVD_VR recovery alternative.

I finalized the disc using the dvd recorder (it might be optional but I have yet to try photorec on an unfinalized disc)

ripped to iso
loaded iso as a virtual drive (Daemon Tools)

checked it out, only 700MB of files yet the iso is 4 GB....

used WinDirStat on it (see attached screenshot)
a lot of used space unaccounted for!


used PhotoRec from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
(it could work directly on real disc but faster from iso + virtual drive)

PhotoRec seems to be controlled mostly with arrows and enter key... this is what I did in PhotoRec:
chose dvd drive
chose non partitioned media (I went with this since UDF isn't listed)
chose the one partition and search
for filesystem, I chose other
browsed to empty folder (windows: to change drive letter keep going to "..")
once inside desired folder, press Y

it recovered one large mpg file, which accounted for the large space used

just to test, I tried playing the .mpg in VLC media player. it managed to be in sync but only because video did not appear right away (VLC media player is smart!)

if I were to demux this to elementary streams now, I'd get sync problems in the editing stage

used ffmpeg to convert to avi:

ffmpeg -i f909952.mpg -acodec copy -vcodec copy tvshows_recovery.avi

opened in VirtualDub

first bunch of frames happened to be drop frames. I selected a range from the first non drop frame to the end of the file

set video to direct stream copy

save as avi: tvshows_clip.avi

back to ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i tvshows_clip.avi -f mpeg2video -vcodec copy tvshows.m2v
ffmpeg -i tvshows_clip.avi -f mp2 -acodec copy tvshows.mp2

finally its editable in Mpeg2Schnitt without sync problem.








PhotoRec might work better if you run it directly on the disc instead of the iso:

run PhotoRec, get large mpg

ffmpeg -i f16384.mpg -f mpeg2video -vcodec copy tvshows.m2v
ffmpeg -i f16384.mpg -f mp2 -acodec copy tvshows.mp2

load the m2v into Mpeg2Schnitt

if there's audio sync problems, try the virtualdub method above


update: dvd recorder made another bad disc after recording

every dvd device thought it was a blank disc

loaded it into IsoPuzzle, force size: change "Drive Reported" to "-- Free --", defaults to Drive Reported (0 in this case) sectors change to 2295104, saved iso to x:\UNNAMED_VOLUME.iso

photorec can read from files rather than drives. command prompt: photorec_win x:\UNNAMED_VOLUME.iso

ended up with an unexpected filetype (gpg) and fragmented mpeg files
to solve in photorec: went into File Opts, disabled all file types (press s) and selected mpg

now I've got a big .mpg file to edit