How to check for corrupt AVI files?

[GerberMultiT00l]

Hello,

I am sorry if this one has already been answered. I spent 1 hour searching and found no relevant thread. Maybe I was just not looking in the right place or maybe this topic has not been covered.

I have a collection of several hundred recorded television shows. I had a problem with my hard drive(s) in a windows XP system a while ago. Many data files became corrupted. Quite a few of them were AVI files.

The corrupt AVI files are in tact and are still somewhat watchable. The catch is that I think there are small corrupt portions within the file where the data is garbled. These corrupt portions cause WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER CLASSIC to skip back to the beginning of the file when it hits a bad patch. The DIVX PLAYER will play right through the bad patch but the picture becomes extremely distorted while playing through it. The audio might become out of sync afterwards. Both players will continue to play the file fine if I manually skip over the corrupt portion(s).

I want to rid myself of the bad files and replace them with good ones. This is very time consuming. I was hoping a software utility existed that could scan through a whole file and give me a GOOD or BAD answer. I would then only need to replace the bad. The only way I have to detect a bad file now is to watch through the whole show in real time. I don't have time to watch several hundred TV shows to determine which are good and bad. Can you think of anything?

Much of what you guys say here confuses me. Your discussions go way over my head. However, if there was a quick and easy way to fix corrupt files please let me know. Just remember, I am very new at this. It must be simple enough for a newbie to follow.

I tried this wonderful utility called GSPOT. I'm sure you all know it well. However, it will not tell me the condition of the whole file. I am under the impression that it only checks to see if it can render the first few seconds of the video. Am I correct?

Thank you very much.

Gerrrb.

[unskinnyboy]

GSpot is a media info utility. It does not repair files nor does it report corrupt avis.

Your issue is probably bad frames in the avi. If so, VirtualDubMoD can scan thru the video stream and report errors if any (Load the avi into VirtualDubMoD and Video-->Scan video stream for errors-->Scan). If the header of the avi itself is corrupt, VirtualDubMoD will attempt to rebuild it as soon as you load the avi into it.

But still the above said can be tedious if you have a large bunch of avis to go thru and fix..so try DivXRepair 1.0.1 (http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/DivXRepair-Download-14597.html).

Description and usage:

Using DivXRepair, you can repair corrupt avi files and eliminate freezes. This program automatically detects and eliminates bad frames. The utilisation is simple:

- Add one or more AVI files in the list using the Add File.
- then click on Repair files

If undecodable and/or freezing frames are found, DivXRepair will cut off the bad parts and will save a new file in the same directory with the old file. A complete report is generated and displayed after the operation is complete.

Good luck!

[GerberMultiT00l]

GEESH!!! Thank you very much for the fast and informative reply.

Just out of curiousity. Have you ever witnessed what I am talking about with my corrupt files? I'm not sure if you are a MP Classic user. When the player hits a bad frame it skips back to the beginning of the video. Wierd....

I've tried numerous other players. None of them play yhe file right through without crashing or some other glitch.

Gerrrb.

[unskinnyboy]

I have indeed come across a wide range of b0rked files in my lifetime, yes. Am I an MPC user? well, I do have it on my PC but BSPlayer is my primary player. I use MPC only for RM files.

The usual kind of corrupt avis I have seen are the ones which either freeze a DShow player like BSPlayer or in case I am using VLC, just close it without warning. I once had such an avi and it would crash all players just 5 mins before the climax of the movie (wouldn't you be pissed?). In this case DivXRepair failed. But I searched and searched and found this site - www.fixvideo.com and downloaded their shareware called 'Divx Avi Asf Wmv Wma Rm Rmvb Fix Joiner 3.23'..I didn't think much of this (sounded like one of those shady software companies which wraps their own lame GUIs around OSS utils), but this thing actually worked in fixing the last corrupted 5 mins of the movie where DivXRepair util failed.

So you might want to add 'Divx Avi Asf Wmv Wma Rm Rmvb Fix Joiner 3.23' also to your arsenal.

[GerberMultiT00l]

I tried Divxrepair. Works like a charm. The problem being many of the files I've repaired have a large amount of dropped frames (2,000 or more). Much of my video clips content are being clipped out. I'm missing minutes of content.

Well, at least it can detect good or bad files. That's what I wanted to do originally. I can also keep files that were not damaged too bad (maybe only a couple hundred frames dropped).

The rest will need to be re-ripped and compressed.

Thanks,

Gerrrb.

[Pookie]

There's also the AviMaster utility. Command line driven and many features.

http://www.thozie.de/avimaster/

[tigerman8u]

divfix is free and does a good job.