Recovering corrupted video file
I witnessed a car collision a couple of days ago while driving, and since I have a dash cam (Genius Full HD), I assumed I could send the video file of the collision to one of the drivers. The dash cam records in 3 minute segments, and it glitched on the video where the collision occurred, which corrupted that recording. When I tried to open it in Quicktime, it crashed with error message QuickTime Player can't open "FILE5853.MOV" because the movie's file format isn't recognized. Similarly, VLC does nothing when I tried to open it there, and produces the following Terminal output
VLC media player 2.1.5 Rincewind (revision 2.1.4-59-g5f258d5)
[0x101902a80] main interface error: no suitable interface module
[0x100237b20] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x100850000] moov atom not found
[0x103946860] mp4 demux error: MP4 plugin discarded (no moov,foov,moof box)
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x10402ae00] moov atom not found
[0x103946860] avcodec demux error: Could not open FILE5853.MOV: Unknown error: 1094995529
[0x1092622a0] mp4 demux error: MP4 plugin discarded (no moov,foov,moof box)
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x10200ea00] moov atom not found
[0x1092622a0] avcodec demux error: Could not open FILE5853.MOV: Unknown error: 1094995529
Out of curiosity, I hexdumped FILE5853.MOV, and I know there's about 67 MB of something in there, but I have no way of getting the video. Any suggestion on how to get the video of there (if it's even possible) would be very appreciated.
Answer
Try recover_mp4_to_h264. You will need to provide a valid reference i.e. one of the intact segments.
Usage:
recover_mp4_to_h264 in_good_similar.mp4 --avcc
recover_mp4_to_h264 in_corrupted.mp4 out_video.h264 [out_audio.aac | out_audio.wav | out_audio.mp3] [<recorder>]
recover_mp4_to_h264 in_corrupted.mp4 out_video.h264 [--aac | --pcm | --mp3] [<recorder>]