Treasured's Movie Repair Guide -- Useful Tools

This is a list of tools that can be useful to repair movies.

None of them will do miracles: Repair is a very specialized task. Having a hammer doesn't make you a good carpenter.


But carpenters need good hammers!


SimpleMovieX

Also a creation from Aero Quartet, SimpleMovieX is a simple video editor that helps to hide defects after a repair.

It can synchronize audio and video, edit the frames or segments that are not good, and save or export in a variety of formats.


Dumpster

Displays the structure of a QuickTime movie (atoms tree) and allows some small changes.

Freely available for Mac OS X: http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/quicktimeintro/tools/


AtomicParsley

Command line utility for Mac OS X

Used with the --test option, it displays the atom structure. It will stop when an error is encountered, which makes it useful to do a Container Structure Correction.


You need to modify it to make it work with mov files. Treasured ships with a modified version, inside Resources


HexFriend http://www.ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/

A free, open source hexadecimal editor for Mac OS X.

In-house, Aero Quartet uses a modified version optimized for atom structures parsing. We will release it someday.


HexEdit http://hexedit.sourceforge.net/

A free, open source hexadecimal editor for Mac OS X.

This one can also also the resource forks of file.


xxd

A command line hex editor for Mac OS X.

Can display files contents and also apply patches to file.


xxd -s 0x30 -l 0x100 original.mov

 

0000030: 2000 0004 0813 1008 51fa 1000 a600 edff   .......Q.......

0000040: f5ff d800 7fff 4213 0809 81f8 c1ff 8000  ......B.........

0000050: 0000 2204 53b8 881e af73 4da6 4621 0c0c  ..".S....sM.F!..

0000060: f240 9e53 1348 1521 8310 e524 546c 2a65  .@.S.H.!...$Tl*e

0000070: d4a1 34aa 5130 4039 4206 1295 240c 252a  ..4.Q0@9B...$.%*

0000080: 481d 8e38 98a5 0868 6128 40d3 64c1 034d  H..8...ha(@.d..M

0000090: 8a85 84a7 1b04 151c 6c40 34a9 4c10 5429  ........l@4.L.T)

00000a0: 4c48 2a14 a624 150a 5314 c252 a10c 094a  LH*..$..S..R...J

00000b0: 9207 752a 3000 1ca9 5284 98c9 4a92 0026  ..u*0...R...J..&

00000c0: ef04 370a ba83 12a2 5080 1054 71b0 02a3  ..7.....P..Tq...

00000d0: 8c49 d811 8054 1800 7ac6 09a4 558c 1348  .I...T..z...U..H

00000e0: ab18 2691 5630 4e64 a836 965d 3982 0a85  ..&.V0Nd.6.]9...

00000f0: 2982 0a85 2982 0a85 2982 0a85 240c 1052  )...)...)...$..R

0000100: 9820 a852 9820 a852 9820 a852 984c 2611  . .R. .R. .R.L&.

0000110: d5b7 1d59 5750 6254 4a10 04c2 5084 93ba  ...YWPbTJ...P...

0000120: 8c6a 9150 62a1 64a8 3686 9156 304d 22ac  .j.Pb.d.6..V0M".


mp4creator

A command line utility focusing on MP4 containers. Useful to mux or wrap media data into a playable file.

mp4creator is open-source. You will have to compile it yourself unless you find binaries.


/usr/local/bin/mp4creator -create=extracted.mp4v -r 15 repaired.mp4


VLC VideoLan http://videolan.org

Mainly a video player that is very tolerant with defects.

But it can also be useful to rewrap files and get rid of small problems.