I have a strange problem with a few MPEG files (.mp4 and .mpg).
These files have been living on my hard disk for quite a long time. I also have recently copied them into a new disk, not having the earlier store suffered any kind of damage (I had a broken disk but it was another one, so I just recreated partition layout).
I'm not sure about when it started to happen, if it happened gradually or suddenly, but...
The problem
I can start to play these video files, but I can't finish all the play. The video interrupts at a certain point. Video playback is deterministic, which is one or more of the following will always happen given the same video:
- VLC sees a way much shorter video (i.e. I knew it was 5min, VLC sees 1:01)
- Seeking, in VLC or MPC, stops the video; instead simply watching it without interruption leads to natural end of playback
- Video after a fixed time point is not available, no matter what
- Audio plays fine, video starts to skip more and more frames, until both audio and video are unavailable
The non-diagnosis
It's very difficult to say if it's a problem with the file system or something else. I remember the old drive didn't suffer any failure, and the current file system is said being OK by chkdsk.
The question
Is there a way to recover these broken files? Perhaps without doing a file recovery operation on the whole drive, which should be pointless (file system entries are intact)
ffmpeg, e.g.ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -map 0 output.mkv. Does that print any obvious errors? Do the remuxed files play? (What operating system are you on, actually?)