Software mentioned in the above blog is quite promising, but i know one more software which i used, when i faced this problem. Few days before I was watching my favorite movie on my laptop but it stops in between while playing and starts giving error message. Later on when I met with my uncle I told this problem to him, he suggested me to use mov repair tool to fix mov movie file. I used this tool and got my movie file back. To know how click on the page links: http://www.movrepair.net/fix-mov-movie-file.html
Well ... I did give it a go. But when it's first thing upon startup was to ask for my password to "make changes", I quit the app. There was no additional documentation in the downloaded DMG, so I couldn't check what exactly intended the app to do. I don't really think that to use the app I should give it administrative privileges on my Mac. Sorry, this one was a no go for me.
I had the same issue and found the best way is to have avconv/ffmpeg write the necessary header information right away during recording thus avoiding currupt files. This is done by the "-f ismv" flag, also consider adding "-movflags frag_keyframe". This way, if the recording is interrupted, the file will not be corrupt. Also if you need to stop the recording, send a SIGINT instead of SIGTERM (default signal). This is done by '-2' in the kill command, e.g. 'kill -2 <ffmpeg-pid>'.
Hope this helps!
I think we're still talking about two very different things. Your tip works if one uses avconv/ffmpeg to record a video. My problem came from using a phone's camera or a camcorder. How do you "put" ffmpeg into these? Most probably you don't. If you got a hardware (with a firmware) that produces faulty MP4 files under certain circumstances, then you need a way to fix these files. And this is what my original post was about.
I guess if somebody has the right motivation (eg. the recording of his nuptial ceremony gets corrupted due to dead battery and missing moov atom), he finds a way. This is what happened to Federico who eventually came up with an open source (free) solution to his problem. He published his code on his blog (and via github ). It's something of a hack and his only goal was to fix the one video he needed to recover. But the basics are there. If somebody would pick up the work Federico started, an open source MP4/MOV fixer (a viable alternative to Grau's Video Repair Tool) could be born.
There's a solution for Android devices: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iwobanas.videorepair
Based on it's description, it seems this one works on the same principle as Grau's Video Repair Tool. The app has in-app purchases so it might ask you to buy some licenses for full video repair, I haven't tested it.
I had a bad file that I desperately wanted to recover. audio m4a with no atom moov at the end.
Although the frequency is off, I was able to recover the audio otherwise using the steps here: http://sysfrontier.com/en/2014/12/31/hello-world/
Good luck to you.
I know this is an old article - but I had to say THANK YOU!
Had 3 .MDT files from a Panasonic LX100. Found this article and the "direct link" still worked.
Nothing short of miraculous the way Video Repair Tool 1.5 managed to recover all 3 .MDT files.
Thank you so much for posting this
So... seven years later, just like so many others, I came across your page as well, and attempted to fix a broken video... although I had no luck in my case, since your page is so often visited, I thought I'd add a few tips for 2019...
While the last few links to Grau's Video Repair Tool 1.5 are still working, there's a problem with using it under macOS Catalina (10.15): from Catalina onwards, only 64bit apps will run. Version 1.5 is way too old, so there is only the freeware version to work with.
To make matters worse, Grau seems to have abandoned all development (at least on the Mac side of things) around 2017 or so. Not all is lost, though; you'll be still able to get it working under macOS Catalina, so long as you are familiar with a Unix shell and have installed Brew or MacPorts or something similar (or, at least, the XCode compiler).
First, macOS Catalina is extremely cautious when running third-party apps from unknown developers (i.e. those who have no agreement with Apple for a valid digital signature to sign their own software with). Fortunately, Grau Online has a extremely detailed FAQ which explains how to authorise each component of the Video Repair tool so that you may run it freely.
Now, as far as I can see, Grau Online has developed its Video Repair tool with Embedded Lua . This means that they can develop once, and get it working on multiple platforms (Windows and macOS, in this case). However, their application is mostly a very sophisticated 'wrapper' around other common video processing tools with a GUI, namely, it calls ffmpeg , mencoder , and mplayer . Technically, only ffmpeg is really needed; mencoder will post-process and re-encode the repaired video so that it can be playable anywhere (this is an optional second step that can be selected and configured under the Options button). mplayer is a free and open-source multimedia player which runs from the command line and works pretty much with everything out there (useful if you can't watch the repaired video with the usual tools — QuickTime on the Mac, Media Player on Windows, etc.) Because most people won't have these tools installed, the developers have included a version of these tools as part of the ZIP file; the gs application (which is what you launch to get the Video Repair tool working) will only use those versions that come with the tool.
Unfortunately, though, these versions are from 2006 and 2011, which means that they're hopelessly outdated, and haven't been compiled to 64 bits (but they will still run under ancient hardware with PowerPC CPUs!).
The first thing to do, therefore, is to use either Brew or MacPorts to install the current versions of all these tools, then go to the folder where these are stored inside the videorepair folder (the ZIP file I've got had these files under videorepair/toolsdarwin/ ), rm them manually and add symbolic links to the new versions. If you're using Brew, these will be found under /usr/local/bin , so the commands you need to give under Terminal (assuming you've successfully downloaded all three of them) are:
Now you can launch the video repair tool as explained under the instructions (basically, open the folder for videorepair and double-click on mac_start.command , then select the language to proceed), and all will work!
Well, not all — because this will be the 'freeware' version, it will only output half the movie, of course. Technically, though, you might be able to go to Options and select the last 50% of the movie, and theoretically, you'd get all the video — but I haven't tried it out, since, sadly, in my case, the recovery didn't work — although the logs from Video Repair show that the file contains a lot of video & audio information, once the file is 'repaired', it remains unplayable for some reason (VLC is able to play the audio... but there is no sound, either).
I'm now looking for alternatives (there are not many...) but, hopefully, my comment will help out those who wish to try the tool in macOS versions made from 2019 onwards, but has come across the errors coming from the provided 32-bit applications, which will be not only hopelessly outdated but also will not be able to run as macOS Catalina will refuse to run anything which is not specifically compiled 64-bits apps...
4-5 years ago my Mac died and I already decided which way I wanted to go: I switched to Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS for personal use (I've made this switch 10-15 years ago for work, but didn't want to ditch the Mac as long as it worked).
I've already envisioned an open-source solution to this specific problem (that Grau's Video Repair Tool solved for the most part) in a 2015's comment of this thread , but didn't look into it in detail.
It seems that the potential loss of a wedding ceremony video was motivation enough for a coder (Federico Ponchio) to actually write an open-sourced piece of code that does pretty much the same as Grau's tool. And voala: Untrunc was born!
The repository is available here: https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc
This time I did test it by making two short videos with the same camera (a Samsung Galaxy S10 phone):

20191025_141707.mp4

20191025_141723.mp4

The latter was used as a "reference" (for a good video file) and the former was used (by cutting off it's end) as a "bad"/truncated video that has no moov atom.
Here's a short log of my test using Ubuntu 18: