I've been looking to see why a corrupt MOV video shows up as MPG, how I can fix them, and hope you guys can help! I searched the forums to check for similar questions.

-> Background: I deleted the wrong MOV file (~1Gb) from my full canon camera's memory card, and took two pictures (~20Mb) which undoubtedly over-wrote part of the video file. I'm using Win XP.

-> Question: is there a way to extract image frames from the file, or to tell if images are even there?

-> Attempt 1 : eImage Recovery found two video files: about 720 Mb, and about 40 Mb. eImage automatically gave the extension MPG which is wrong of course. No player (VLC, MPlayer, etc) is able to play them.

-> Attempt 2 : GSpot can't recognize a codec for any of the files.

-> Attempt 3 : a hex editor shows the header info is missing from the 720Mb file, and the footer is in the 40Mb file: I compared the recovered files to others that were intact to see what to look for.

-> Attempt 4 : only one video-fixing software was able to process a file, and it resulted in an IV41 (Intel) mpg according to GSpot, but this of course doesn't play either, and I have no idea why it should be an IV41; probably GSpot just randomly thinks it's IV41 when it isn't, since it's missing all sorts of data.

-> Attempt 5 : I tried adding in header and footer data to the broken file using a hex editor. Seems MOV files are very sensitive, since removing even one line from the middle of a working file results in it not playing... So manual manipulation is probably too complex.


Any ideas on how to get parts of the video back? Clearly there is a large chunk of *something* there I'm willing to do a lot of work, or look for a service that can recover them.