How To Troubleshoot .flv files?

[abrogard]

I downloaded an .flv and it was supposed to be 4 minutes long. But VLC and Mediap Player Classic and a couple of other things only played a little short of 2 minutes and then it stopped.

I tried to fix it with a couple of things I found through googling and downloading, installing - yamb and getflv - but neither worked and I finished up with a truncated file - either or both of these progs took the original and worked on it, changed it, and saved it back with the same name, destroying the original.

So I only have this 2 minute segment left. So there's no longer any question of fixing that one.

The 'fixing' progs apparently only went as far as the 'broken' bit and took that for EOF. What is EOF for an .flv? Is there one?

I need a 'fixing' prog smart enough to display what it finds and show me the total file length - so's I can check it is seeing the whole of the actual file - and shows me how it sees that as being allocated. So I can check if all this appears to be consistent. There's obviously something wrong when progs report the file as having a timelength of 4 minutes but cease at 2.

Maybe that's a simple error in a field somewhere reporting the length of the data segment.

In which case something that somehow can identify data - if that is at all possible - and show me where it is would be a great help, because if the file timelength was accurate then the second 2 minutes must have been either without data - which I'm saying it'd be great if something could show me that - or was inaccessible because some caused the file processing to cease at 2 minutes.

I need something that will tell me things. Not something that just thinks it has done its job and cuts off half my file, or something that does something unexplained to the file and says 'done', leaving me with a file that still won't work.

Asking too much here, am I?

[Baldrick]

You could also try avidemux.

Video repair tool has worked for most files I have repaired. It's not free though. THe trial will just repair half the movie but will give you an error report with maybe some info.