Untrunc

Restore a damaged (truncated) mp4, m4v, mov, 3gp video. Provided you have a similar not broken video. And some luck.

You need:

• Another video file which isn't broken
• Basic ability to use a command line

Building

In certain cases a specific version of ffmpeg is needed. Untrunc works great with ffmpeg 3.3.9.

with system libraries

sudo apt-get install libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev
# get the source code
make
sudo cp untrunc /usr/local/bin

with local libraries

Just use following commands, make will do the rest for you.

sudo apt-get install libva-dev liblzma-dev libx11-dev libbz2-dev zlib1g-dev yasm pkg-config wget
make FF_VER=3.3.9
sudo cp untrunc /usr/local/bin

Using

You need both the broken video and an example working video (ideally from the same camera, if not the chances to fix it are slim).

Run this command in the folder where you have unzipped and compiled Untrunc but replace the /path/to/... bits with your 2 video files:

./untrunc /path/to/working-video.m4v /path/to/broken-video.m4v

Then it should churn away and hopefully produce a playable file called broken-video_fixed.m4v.

That's it you're done!

(Thanks to Tom Sparrow for providing the guide)

Help/Support

Reporting issues

Use the -v parameter for a more detailed output. Both the healthy and corrupt file might be needed to help you.

Donation

If you managed to recover the video, help me to find time to keep working on this software and make other people happy. If you didn't, I need more corrupted samples to improve the program and I might solve the issue, who knows... so write me.

Donations can be made at my page, http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~ponchio/untrunc.php, and promptly converted into beer.

Thank you.