Question / Help Is it possible to recover or play my mp4 video?

M

MudB3RT

New Member
So I was recording while streaming and it stopped because of my space being full on my hard drive. Now it's a 75gig mp4 file but not able to be opened on both WIndows Media Classic and VLC. Any chance I can still open it? If not, well I learned my lesson... i'll just clear space. Any help appreciated. Sorry if this if its in the wrong area. First post ever.

LOG FILE: https://obsproject.com/logs/fdkDNZdBKugTMokN

EDIT: if this same problem with space were to happen again, is it true I can open it still if i recorded it as an flv or mkv format? I read on a post in 2017 that those formats are more reliable? If true, is it worst quality compared to mp4? I'd be editing it on Premiere eventually.
 
carlmmii

carlmmii

Active Member
Most likely, no -- mp4 requires closing metadata to be written once the recording is finished, which requires specific information about the exact length of the recording once complete. If the recording is interrupted and OBS is unable to write this information, then that file will end up corrupted and usually unable to be recovered.

.flv and .mkv do not have this issue, as these are designed as streaming media containers. The actual quality you get is no different whatsoever -- they're just containers for the actual encoded data (the h.264 video and aac audio). If you absolutely need an .mp4 format for use in other programs, then you can use the Remux feature in OBS to quickly convert an .flv or .mkv into mp4 format. No re-encoding is done, it's just a container swap.
 
M

MudB3RT

New Member
So I tried to stream with MKV and my comp crashed and it saved a playable video. SO I can confirm that's the safe route to go. I don't think anyone else is going to reply and tell me how to fix my file that's most likely corrupted so if an admin wants to close the thread they can.
 
M

MudB3RT

New Member
OMG I feel so confused trying to follow the direction to untrunc... I try to take it slowly and do the steps properly but I'm doing it all wrong I think lol. Anyways, I'm so over trying to recover the video haha. I'm just happy MKV is a container that allows you to recover a file and change it to mp4 later on. Thanks though @Suslik V
 
koala

koala

Active Member
@Suslik V Interesting tool your untrunc-w. But given the slowness of untrunc-w, to avoid too much frustration I propose some command line option to process only the first few megabytes of a broken file. I tested the tool, and for my test video, the repair seemed ok at first glance but actually only the first or last third of every frame was recovered correctly and the rest of the frame was a colored mess. Processing some gig takes hours, and only to find it wasn't working isn't good.

I really don't know how the tool works and what the tuning parameters do, which is probably the case for 100% of other prospective users as well. If setting correct parameters really matter, it might be good if untrunc-w does multiple runs with automatically variated parameter values, and each one producing a new "untruncated" mp4. Then the user can check all of them, and perhaps one of them contains a really fixed file, and then he can apply the parameters of exactly this file and run the full run to recover all.

(I did the test by truncating a good and finalized video - not really a file that was aborted mid-recording, if that matters. The referenced good video was a different video of course, not the original untruncated one)
 
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