Recovering Panasonic MP4 files from SD

[sgreszcz]

Hi all,

I ran into a problem where I didn't correctly transfer all the files off my SD card before formatting/reusing it.  It is nothing critical, but I've been trying to recover the files using "photorec" on the Mac.  I recovered most of the .jpg and .rw2 files, but I'm having trouble with the video files.

Photorec has recovered a bunch of .mp4 and .mov files, however I cannot play them back with Quicktime, MPEGstreamclip, nor VLC.  I'm assuming that the .mov files are the actual video media as they are larger files, and the smaller .mp4 files are just the container or pointer to the video.

Any guidance or experiences with video file recovery or tools would be appreciated, thanks.

Stephen

[no_connection]

Did you try enable brute force in options? Was a while ago I used it but it might spew out more files to try. I have not found any better than Photorec tho.

*edit* changing extension to .mp4 don't work? (guessing no)

*edit2* Can't remember if it was this tool I used, have to look closer, http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~ponchio/untrunc.php

but it could possibly fix truncated files that have been written over partially.

[sgreszcz]

1 hour ago, no_connection said:

Did you try enable brute force in options? Was a while ago I used it but it might spew out more files to try. I have not found any better than Photorec tho.

*edit* changing extension to .mp4 don't work? (guessing no)

*edit2* Can't remember if it was this tool I used, have to look closer, http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~ponchio/untrunc.php

but it could possibly fix truncated files that have been written over partially.

Hi there, thanks for your response.  

I've been doing some more digging and it looks as though I need to find a repair tool to rebuild the video/audio mux.  I have tried changing the .mov extension to .mp4 and that didn't work.  This program http://grauonline.de/cms2/?page_id=5 seems to try to rebuild the file based on using a working file from the same camera.  I just tried it a couple of minutes ago on one of the recovered .mov files and I got the audio, but black for video.  

I will try some more things, just for the experience if I need to recover something crucial some day.

[no_connection]

This is the tool I have used:
http://www.videohelp.com/software/recover-mp4-to-h264

There is also a linux only tool, command line that was a bit if work to get running. Ill link it if I can find it again.