Corrupted video (mp4) files.

[bkboggy]

So, my wife's phone (Galaxy Note 2) was running out of memory. She decided to move all of her video files into one folder to be prepared for migration to our NAS. When she finished consolidating the files, everything looked fine, but she didn't play any of the videos. She then noticed that some of the videos went black in the gallery. She tried opening them and they failed to run. I tried running those videos on Win7 with VLC, on Mac (which tried to convert them and failed), I tried recovering them with http://grauonline.de/ application and only got the sound back. Out of 51 videos that she moved, about 30 were corrupted. I am guessing that because she only had approximately ~5-6MB of storage space left on her phone, during the movement, there wasn't enough for cache or whatever (I have very limited experience with Android development, so I'm not sure how it works on that OS), and the files became corrupted.

Has anyone experienced anything similar? Everything I've read had to do with bad SD cards, corruption during recording, etc. But I couldn't find anything that was similar to our situation. I also couldn't find any solutions to fix it. Does anyone have any ideas? Those videos are priceless to us, because they're of our daughter.... so recovering them is my highest priority.

I should mention that HEX data doesn't look bad, as in... I see no zeroes. Therefore, data should be recoverable? I was able to get the sound back, but no video.

Here's entropy report for one of the videos:

[NOTICE] entropy 0 - 21147 -- 0.997836
[NOTICE] entropy 21147 - 42294 -- 0.997699
[NOTICE] entropy 42294 - 63441 -- 0.997829
[NOTICE] entropy 63441 - 84588 -- 0.997875
[NOTICE] entropy 84588 - 105735 -- 0.997938
[NOTICE] entropy 105735 - 126882 -- 0.997796
[NOTICE] entropy 126882 - 148029 -- 0.997728
[NOTICE] entropy 148029 - 169176 -- 0.997513
[NOTICE] entropy 169176 - 190323 -- 0.997645
[NOTICE] entropy 190323 - 211470 -- 0.997858
[NOTICE] entropy 211470 - 232617 -- 0.414821


0.6 or higher means it contains video data. I tried every option in that program and I couldn't repair. I can't find another one that people say works.

 

[wizzrah]

So, my wife's phone (Galaxy Note 2) was running out of memory. She decided to move all of her video files into one folder to be prepared for migration to our NAS. When she finished consolidating the files, everything looked fine, but she didn't play any of the videos. She then noticed that some of the videos went black in the gallery. She tried opening them and they failed to run. I tried running those videos on Win7 with VLC, on Mac (which tried to convert them and failed), I tried recovering them with http://grauonline.de/ application and only got the sound back. Out of 51 videos that she moved, about 30 were corrupted. I am guessing that because she only had approximately ~5-6MB of storage space left on her phone, during the movement, there wasn't enough for cache or whatever (I have very limited experience with Android development, so I'm not sure how it works on that OS), and the files became corrupted.

Has anyone experienced anything similar? Everything I've read had to do with bad SD cards, corruption during recording, etc. But I couldn't find anything that was similar to our situation. I also couldn't find any solutions to fix it. Does anyone have any ideas? Those videos are priceless to us, because they're of our daughter.... so recovering them is my highest priority.

I should mention that HEX data doesn't look bad, as in... I see no zeroes. Therefore, data should be recoverable? I was able to get the sound back, but no video.

So this is from the PC to the NAS correct?

 

[bkboggy]

No. It was meant for movement from her phone to NAS, but we didn't even get that far, because her videos were corrupted after she moved them within her phone. They were in different folders and she consolidated them into one. So, the videos never left the phone.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Perhaps transferring to a PC to see if it can repair the corrupted files?

 

[bkboggy]

As I stated in my original post, I've already done that. And on Mac. I tried the repair tool, I've tried conversion, I've tried several players. The data is there and I can get it to start and play sound with the repair too, but no video. So, it's scrambled... I just have no idea how to repair it.

 

[Rukbat]

So, my wife's phone (Galaxy Note 2) was running out of memory. She decided to move all of her video files into one folder to be prepared for migration to our NAS.

NEVER move files on a phone. Copy them, paste them to the destination, test them then, if they copied correctly, delete the original. Reason? Because of what happened to your wife's files.

She then noticed that some of the videos went black in the gallery.

That's because there was no video in them.

I am guessing that because she only had approximately ~5-6MB of storage space left on her phone, during the movement, there wasn't enough for cache or whatever (I have very limited experience with Android development, so I'm not sure how it works on that OS), and the files became corrupted.

Since most videos are larger than 5 or 6MB, that's what would happen. A paste would fail and you'd be left with the original file. A move ... when there's not enough room for both copies of the file, the origin and the destination, things tend to get messed up.

Does anyone have any ideas? Those videos are priceless to us, because they're of our daughter.... so recovering them is my highest priority.

Maybe - but I'm not holding out any hope.

I should mention that HEX data doesn't look bad, as in... I see no zeroes.

You should. Hex data runs from 0 to F. If there's not a single 0 in an entire file, it's either a VERY rare occurrence or something's wrong.

Therefore, data should be recoverable? I was able to get the sound back, but no video.

Sound and video are in different files in the mp4 envelope.

What you do depends on whether the files are now in internal or external storage. If she copied the files to internal storage (and that includes the emulated SD card), you can connect the phone to the computer and run PhotoRec on it and hope it finds something. If she copied the files to the external SD card, you can mount the card n the computer (take it out of the phone, put it into an adapter) and run z-a-recovery on the card. But if the files overwrote themselves, there's not going to be anything to recover (as Microsoft found out with DOS 5.0).

Whatever you do, DO NOT write or save ANYTHING to that phone until you recover the videos or give up. Even receiving a phone call writes an entry in the call log, and that could overwrite a video.

@Golddriver:
The actual data isn't linked, the links are to the corrupted data. Copying the files will only copy the corrupted data. The video has to be recovered from the original data, which is no longer linked to directory entries.

 

[bkboggy]

You should. Hex data runs from 0 to F. If there's not a single 0 in an entire file, it's either a VERY rare occurrence or something's wrong.

As in, it's not 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 <--- missing data. I know hex, I have x86 experience. What I'm trying to say is that data is not missing. If a large chunk contained nothing but 0's, then we know that there's no video or audio data in it.

Sound and video are in different files in the mp4 envelope.

avc1 and mp4a packaged under mp4, right? I have very little experience with video and audio files.



Luckily she didn't delete the files from the phone yet. I went to college and when I cameback she told me she "moved" them to her Mac, so I almost had a heart attack. Luckily, she just copied them. As far as writing anything to that phone... yeah, she's been using it for the past 12 hours (internet, phone calls, etc).

When she was doing the whole moving thing, she was moving them from SD card onto the phone. So, the phone has the links to the corrupted data. Therefore, SD card should still have the original files. I'm doing a run at it with photorec right now, we'll see in an hour if it finds them. It found over 1,500 files so far, but it's a 15GB storage, so I'm hoping that figure will keep on rising. I'll try z-a-recovery afterwards if it doesn't work.

I definitely appreciate your help thus far.

By the way, forgot to mention that I went on http://mp4repair.org/ and uploaded one of the corrupted videos I got off the phone. It was able to recover it and looked good in the preview. I just don't wish to pay $27 per video. It would be over $800... so I'm hoping to find a better way.

 

[Rukbat]

If PhotoRec is finding files, you probably don't need ZAR. ZAR is for when the CPU in the SD card (yep - there's a whole computer in that little piece of plastic) goes bad, so you can't tell it to give you the data. Then ZAR bypasses it and talks to the memory chip itself.

If PhotoRec is finding files, the chip is working. Get comfortable, though - I once had it running for a week on a corrupted hard drive. (Found files I had forgotten I ever had.)