Need Help Recovering Corrupt Video files and got into an Accident

LauraYuan

LauraYuan

n3wb
Dec 25, 2019
13
4
US, Los Angeles
Lady yesterday driving like an idiot made a lane change into my son's GTS and denied she made the lane change. Same thing happened about a year ago and the dash cam video settled that dispute real quick. We went to play the video from his Mobius Actioncam and no recent video flies are showing up on the SD card. The camera was flashing like it was recording normally, but there was some problem. I think there is a small chance the video data may be on the card as I ran a data recovery app that recovered a lot of files. However, even the .MOV files it recovered will not play on standard players like VLC and Quicktime. So I think the files are corrupted. I discovered that the battery on the dash cam failed so the camera has been shutting off without properly terminating the video files. Not sure if that caused the problem or if the SD card failed. I've had 2 of the SanDisk memory cards fail in my dash cams so far in the last 2 years so that could also be the issue. In a prior SD card fail the cam looked like it was working normally but nothing was being saved and I could not format the card.

Does anyone know of software that will do a brute force playback of whatever you give it? I'm guessing there has to be something out there that you could specify what codec to use and it would play back whatever data is saved. If only a portion of the video file is damaged, maybe we can recover the lane change.

Would prefer Mac app but Windows is also ok. I tried Yodot MOV Repair for Mac and it wasn't any help.

After this experience, and mine where I found that my SD card failed and it looked like the cam was still working, I plan to swap out my cams for ones that have a display so I can check more often if my cam is actually working. I typically would check my dash cam videos about 1x per month to make sure working. With a unit that has a video display I'd check much more often as I would not have to remove the memory card to playback on a computer.

Damage to GTS not too bad - it has about a fist size dent on the 1/4 panel. Nothing structural but if the repair shows up on a CarFax it could have a significant hit on the car price when it is sold.
 
I don’t think there will be way to recover anything as the dashcam thinks it was recording but the SD card was in a state where it wouldn’t so net effect is that nothing was written.

Seems a bit dodgy if the dashcam never even beeped to suggest there might be an issue? I’ve got a Viofo dashcam and I’m sure that it beeps if it encounters a problem writing to the SD card.
 
LauraYuan said:
However, even the .MOV files it recovered will not play on standard players like VLC and Quicktime. So I think the files are corrupted.
Click to expand...
From what you've described it seems unlikely the dashcam has been working.
Do the recovered files have any reasonable-looking dates on them?
Do they look like they are sized properly for valid recordings?

Maybe attach a candidate here as a sample to look at?
 
Can you play any other videos apart from the one with the accident? E.g. videos recorded just prior and after the file in question?
It could be that the .MOV file is not finalized and miss a header. If this is the case, you can try to repair it with a video repair tool.
Also, if the camera was locked due to a power outage, the file system could fail to update its references and a part of the video may miss from the file.
If you haven't overwritten the SD card with new files, there is still a chance to recover the file by scanning the free space of the SD card for the missing record, as described here:
How to Recover Dash Cam Footage That Won't Play

Also, if you have an access to a Windows PC, you could try a free video repair tool, called Recover_MP4.
 
The last time I had an SD card fail it was in a raspberry pi. The pi thought the card was working. Could write and read from it. But if you power cycled the machine, the card would always revert to the exact state it was in at the time of failure. So the card was only pretending that everything was still fine, but not actually saving new data except in its cache, which gets lost when power is lost.
 
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For a start get rid of the battery and buy the super capacitor pack. It's only around $10 but is far more suited to daschcam use than a battery. Batteries will fail from constant charging and can catch fire in hot cars. A SC will not.

Secondly, you need to bear in mind when choosing an SD card that:

1. You need to select an "Endurance" card. These are designed for constant writes. Most other types of card will take far less repetitive writing than endurance rated ones and so fail faster.

2. You need to check the card regularly after the 1st year as typically they last 2-3 years depending on the amount of usage. With wifi, the easiest way on the mobius (depneding on the model) is to use the app to play back the last file on your phone. If it plays it's ok, if not get the SD card in a pc and verfiy the file is ok and it's the app rather than the card / camera at fault. Either way. when you 1st get the camera running check the card a few times. After that be vigilent as it gets older.
 
LauraYuan said:
Lady yesterday driving like an idiot made a lane change into my son's GTS and denied she made the lane change. Same thing happened about a year ago and the dash cam video settled that dispute real quick. We went to play the video from his Mobius Actioncam and no recent video flies are showing up on the SD card. The camera was flashing like it was recording normally, but there was some problem. I think there is a small chance the video data may be on the card as I ran a data recovery app that recovered a lot of files. However, even the .MOV files it recovered will not play on standard players like VLC and Quicktime. So I think the files are corrupted. I discovered that the battery on the dash cam failed so the camera has been shutting off without properly terminating the video files. Not sure if that caused the problem or if the SD card failed. I've had 2 of the SanDisk memory cards fail in my dash cams so far in the last 2 years so that could also be the issue. In a prior SD card fail the cam looked like it was working normally but nothing was being saved and I could not format the card.

Does anyone know of software that will do a brute force playback of whatever you give it? I'm guessing there has to be something out there that you could specify what codec to use and it would play back whatever data is saved. If only a portion of the video file is damaged, maybe we can recover the lane change.

Would prefer Mac app but Windows is also ok. I tried Yodot MOV Repair for Mac and it wasn't any help.

After this experience, and mine where I found that my SD card failed and it looked like the cam was still working, I plan to swap out my cams for ones that have a display so I can check more often if my cam is actually working. I typically would check my dash cam videos about 1x per month to make sure working. With a unit that has a video display I'd check much more often as I would not have to remove the memory card to playback on a computer.

Damage to GTS not too bad - it has about a fist size dent on the 1/4 panel. Nothing structural but if the repair shows up on a CarFax it could have a significant hit on the car price when it is sold.
Click to expand...
I know this is almost a year late, but did you ever get this figured out? I have MOV/MP4 repair software. Its a long shot but sometimes they work. It does sound like the camera wasnt recording but thought it was. If there was no visible files but you recovered files with data recovery software, those files were probably old videos.
 
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