Help Recovering a 29 gig AVI

[ReiverDemon]

Okay, here's the deal.

My best friend's grandfather died recently and the funeral was recorded by the church. the funeral was then accidently deleted before any copies were made. my best friend is in afganistan was NOT able to come home for the funeral, but he lived with his grandpa from the time he was 2 until he got married and he and his wife bought a house.

anyways, i was able to recover the data, but the file wouldn't play. (i dont know why the file is so big, but everything the church records is this big... right about a gig per 6 minutes of footage.)

so, i looked up similar problems and figured it was probably bad headers and index. i manually rebuilt enough of the headers for the audio in hex using a similarly recorded file, and was able to recover the audio.

i've been trying to recover the video, and landed on ASF-AVI-RM-WMV Reapir (which is fantastic). it was able to simulate enough of the headers to play the file. (long story short, it's indexing repair keeps cutting part of it out, so i crashed it after it had built the temp file) the temp file will play in VLC ( VLC rebuilds 2 minutes of index, then it will play the entire 2 hour funeral, frame by frame).

Nothing i can find though will rebuild the index. i've tried DivFix++, ASF-AVI-RM-MWV Repair, AVIFixed v2.0b1, AVIFixer, and a few other similar to the last few. Are there any pretty powerful ones anyone can suggest? Or does any one know a better way to fix the headers, or a enough to help guide me through manully coding a new index in hex? i'm trying to actually fix it, cause the church uses something else to make DVD's for people, so they'll be able to cut the file size down to something normal if i can fix the issue with the index. (i assume it's the index cause i am unable to seek through the file).

Any help would be greatly appriciated,
Demon

[poisondeathray]

Did you try the new version of divfix++ ?
The one on this site is 3 years old

This version has some new updates and is about a month old
http://sourceforge.net/projects/divfixpp/

[jagabo]

1 GB for every six minutes sounds like DV AVI. You can use GSpot or MediaInfo to determine the container and codecs.

If DV AVI, I wonder if Enosoft DV Processor has any recovery functions. You could also try loading the file into VirtualDub, selecting Video -> Direct Stream Copy, scrubbing through the video and cutting out the bad parts, then finally saving as a new file.

[ReiverDemon]

yeah, it says that the 87th parameter is inncorrect, and then it runs for a long time like normal, then when it starts actually building the new file, it gets about 2 gigs done and then errors out and says unhandled exception and then if you click ignore and continue it just freezes.

[ReiverDemon]

jagabo,

here is my GSpot output. any sugesstions?

gspot.bmp

[deadrats]

give mpeg streamclip a shot, i have seen it work some miracles on files that other apps absolutely refused to even load.

[ReiverDemon]

deadrats,

it says unreconized file type, and i ask it open it anyways, it seems to load for a long time, then errors out and says can't find the video or audio tracks.

[redwudz]

You may have already tried this, but VLC can also transcode most anything it can play. If it can convert the video to a different format, might give you something to work with.

[jagabo]

You have anAVI file with MJPEG video and uncompressed PCM audio. At 30 GB it probably consists of 15 ODML chunks. But by the end of the first ODML junk the file is corrupt. That most likely occurred because the file undelete utility was not able to determine which unallocated parts of the disk were really parts of the original video file. So parts of the file you have did not come from that video. This is quite common when undeleting large files. I suspect the only way to recover more than first ODML chunk will be to do it by hand -- which requires someone who's quite familiar with how the internal structure of AVI files works, specialized toos, and at 30 GB, lots of patience. It's also possible that everything beyond the first ODML chunk is not even part of the original video file.

If the drive from which this video was undeleted is still available, and hasn't been used too much since the file was deleted, a different undelete program might be able to restore more of the video.

[Vidd]

VLC rebuilds 2 minutes of index, then it will play the entire 2 hour funeral, frame by frame).

If all the frames are displayed, a screen cap might be a solution. That would be about 3,600 frames.
Find the duration VLC displays the frames and write a script or macro to Print Screen the VLC window.
Programs like TMPGEnc can import sequentially numbered bitmaps. Then mux the audio you recovered.

[jagabo]

VLC rebuilds 2 minutes of index, then it will play the entire 2 hour funeral, frame by frame).

Oh, I missed that part. I would try using VLC's Media -> Convert/Save option to create a new AVI file. I think someone suggested that earlier.

[ReiverDemon]

using VLC's Converter is going pretty well, it both creates it's own index and cuts the file down to a normal size, but i keep getting a glossy, kinda white-colored "noise" in the video. (it like a color-dulling overlay that skips around some, which makes it really distracting.)

any sugestions?

thanks again for the help everyone, you've all been great.