Video Repair Guide – Corrupted MP4 / AVI / H264 File Fix

Sometimes, your phone’s recording app may become unresponsive and crash or your phone’s/camera’s/drone’s battery can become dead and abruptly interrupt recording process. In those cases, recordings will NOT be finalized and they’ll refuse to play in any app (phone or desktop) with example messages: “unsupported video format”, “unrecognized file format”, “file with 0 length”, “cannot render file” etc.

HOW TO REPAIR UNPLAYABLE VIDEO FILES RECORDED WITH YOUR PHONE, DRONE OR DIGITAL CAMERA?

There are many different APPs and DESKTOP TOOLS on the market but they are usually NOT FREE! To name just a few most popular:

• Stellar Phoenix Video Repair ($69.99 SOHO Edition)
• Video Repair Tool by Grau GmbH (99 EUR unlimited)
• MP4Fix APP for Android ($3.99)
• Web-Based services (price varies)

Sometimes, even those commercial apps CANNOT fix your videos!

STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL

First, you will need another GOOD video, that will serve as a reference for repair procedure. This reference video should be recorded with the same framerate / bitrate (quality) and codec on the same device (hardware) as the broken video that you’re trying to fix. If you don’t have it, make/record one, usually couple of seconds is all that you need. DO NOT record this reference/example footage on the same memory card / storage media that holds your broken file! If your device is broken or lost, you can use a video from your archive (assuming that you have saved them). If you don’t have a reference video, this guide cannot help you in that unfortunate case :(

Then follow below steps to repair it:

STEP 1

Visit recover_mp4 Video Repair Tool home page or use direct download links of recover_mp4.zip tool:

link #1: http://slydiman.me/download/recover_mp4.zip
link #2: http://slydiman.narod.ru/download/recover_mp4.zip

STEP 2

Download ffmpeg Tool:
https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

(use version that is appropriate for you Operating System, we use Windows 10 64-bit edition)

STEP 3

(For Windows)
Extract ffmpeg.zip, then extract recover_mp4.zip inside /ffmpeg/bin/ directory so that all the .exe files are in the same folder! Also, for simplicity, rename ffmpeg’s directory to a shorter name (useful for next steps).

STEP 4

Copy your “good.mp4” reference file into SAME directory with .exe files as described in STEP 3
Copy your “bad.mp4” damaged file to be repaired into SAME directory with .exe files as described in STEP 3

STEP 5 

(Windows 10)
Search > type CMD > then right click on COMMAND PROMPT to RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR and confirm with YES

STEP 6

Change your working directory inside COMMAND PROMPT to where your ffmpeg.exe and recover_mp4.exe and .mp4video files are (see step 3)

STEP 7

Execute following command inside COMMAND PROMPT + press ENTERSTEP 8

After analysis is completed, run 1st command you received from recover_mp4, for example:

recover_mp4.exe bad.mp4 recovered.h264 recovered.aac

COMMAND EXPLAINED / BREAK-DOWN
recover_mp4.exe | means that we are executing/calling our recovery program/app
bad.mp4 | we pass as a parameter name/path of the damaged video file (since it is in the same directory as recover_mp4.exe tool then we simply just type the filename+extension)
recovered.h264 | we specify the output filename+extension of RAW video portion of recovered file
recovered.aac | we specify the output filename+extension of audio portion of recovered file

NOTE: above are only example commands, they will be different for each video format – follow instructions you receive from recover_mp4 tool!

STEP 9

Then run 2nd command:

ffmpeg.exe -r 30 -i recovered.h264 -i recovered.aac -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -c:v copy -c:a copy recovered.mp4

NOTE: above are only example commands, they will be different for each video format – follow instructions you receive from recover_mp4 tool!

DONE!

Looks too complicated? Watch the 5-minute video version instead.

Your video should be fully recovered and playable in ANY video player :)