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  1. Hello all,
    I am trying to assist a friend of mine with an issue he has with some videos he took on a family skiing trip last year with his Sony Xperia phone. He claims that a few months ago the videos worked fine and he could play them back on his phone however now they are unplayable either on the phone (they are on the SD card) - or if exported to a PC. He can record new videos fine and view they on the vie as well as export them to a PC etc. All the broken files are arround the size you would expect them to be if they contained working video and are not small.

    I have exported all the "broken" videos and tried the obvious vlc fix. I then did a bit of hunting and found "recover_mp4" and seeing as I have a working video from the exact device tried that but alas this did not work either. As a last resort I looked up the file format of MP4 and started opeining the corrupt files in a HEX editor comparing them to the working videos. This is where things start getting strange. I noticed the following

    All the working files look fine - I can see the "ftyp3gp4" and "mdat" followed by the media data and the closing information

    HOWEVER all of the corrupt files have a strange header containing the words "whatever" and "CONSOLE" followed by zeros where you would expect to see video data all the way to line "1ff0h" where it looks like video data starts.

    I have tried things like striping the weird header and zeros and replacing it with the header from the working files - and permutations thereoff. Then running "recover_mp4" but no luck. It is certainly strange that all the corrupt files have the same weird header and zeros up to line 1ffoh. I have attached a couple of snips from the hex editor - one good and one bad.

    Does anyone have any ideas what may have happened here or how to maybe recover the video data?

    Thanks in advance

    Regards

    Mark
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    Image Attached Thumbnails Click image for larger version

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    Click image for larger version

Name:	good.JPG
Views:	104
Size:	89.5 KB
ID:	47978  

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  2. Member Budman1's Avatar
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    Looks like one of those times a camera will throw stuff at the beginning to make you play with proprietary player. Most times just cutting this off fixes unless it contains a password. How much to cut off is the trick.

    Do you have a short file you could upload as-is to test?
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  3. Thanks for the reply.

    The weird thing is that both mp4s were taken with the same Xperia phone (obviously the bad one about a year ago and the good one in the last couple of days) don't understand what could have changed. Also it is strange that the non working mp4s (9 of them) all have the same stuff at the start of the files - surely if the file pointers were messed up this would not be the case?

    I have uploaded the smallest broken video file and a sm,all working one.

    Thanks

    Mark
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  4. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    looks like something overwrote the "bad" files. the mp4 header is gone and the moov atom at the end is gone. it's no longer video.
    --
    "a lot of people are better dead" - prisoner KSC2-303
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  5. yes this is what i thought but weird - what sort of App would do that? and why only some of the files?
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  6. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    all sorts of possible reasons. hardware bug, malware/virus, bad sectors/old dying card, loss of power during write, os malfunction causing data corruption. no way to tell, but i'd at least copy the card to a computer, check it for errors, reformat if it's still good, and then copy back the files. or replace it. if you check the sony xperia phone support forum you'll find that sd card corruption/failure is a topic that's gone on for years without any solution from sony.
    --
    "a lot of people are better dead" - prisoner KSC2-303
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