How to RECOVER CORRUPTED MP4 Files for FREE using FFmpeg and recover_mp4

Corrupted or broken MP4 videos is something of the worst most of us have witnessed in their days as creators. But fear not there is a way to recover broken MP4 Containers!

The reason why an MP4 video file can become broken is that it was not finished properly. This means for some reason the recorder was not able to write the end of the file to the storage device. In case of an mp4 container, this is a big deal because mp4 files contain important metadata at the end of the file. So if this piece is missing the entire video cannot be played back!

So to get around this problem we are going to extract the video and Audio Stream of the broken mp4 file which we want to fix. After we extracted the streams we are going to use the FFmpeg encoder to bundle our streams to a fixed mp4 file.

To learn more about how to fix broken or damaged mp4 video files visit the website of the creator of recover_mp4.

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=== Links ===

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=== Products in this Video (Affiliate links) ===
none, nothing to spend your money on here.
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=== Clarification ===

This video is about how to fix corrupted mp4 files using FFmpeg and recover_mp4. MP container can become corrupted when they're not getting finalized properly.

[TejasTrivedi]

When my daughter was born, I was waiting in the hospital room to hold see her for the first time and hold her in my hands. I had setup my camera to record this moment and it froze while recording after about 5 minutes of recording and the entire file was corrupted. I saved the corrupted file anyway, hoping one day I will be able to find a fix. Today (after nearly 4 years) I found your tutorial and fixed it and watched the video for the first time :) You my friend are earning a lot of good karma here ;) :) <3

[olafvanrenen]

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! For a full day I struggled looking around for a fix on the internet because I didn't want to pay for fixing a video that cost me nothing to capture, but I didn't want to go to the trouble of going back to recapture it. You're a good teacher!

[dantedraven]

THIS MAN DESERVES A MEDAL! Literally have spent 2 days trying to fix this and came across this! Thank you so much dude!

[sarahlindstrom]

Thank you so much for this! I'm a DM and was recording a dnd episode on obs when the power went out. Thank gods for the file still being there, though not playable. Had over 5 hours of audio content saved from the corrupted file, and was able to get it back! It was a pivotal episode too! My players and myself thank you, and their adventure continues still and will be remembered!

[jasonbraun]

Thanks, you really saved me! Especially since I'm not exactly a tech expert and you explained everything you were doing very clearly and still managed to put it into a less than 5 min video.

[p-p]

5 years ago, this man helps me fix a Breath of the Wild playthrough. 5 Years later, hear I am again, fixing a Call of Cthulhu playthrough. I commend you good sir, many thanks and many graces!

[chanytuploads]

Still working even at the end of 2022!

My video file got corrupted as my camera freezes while recording and had to turn it off by removing the battery, the file was saved but cannot be played in any video player!
Thanks a lot, for this very helpful tutorial and tools, no need to download yet another sketchy trial program for fixing stuff as this instruction is very plain and easy to follow!

[pascalburger]

I can't thank you enough for this tutorial. I could recover one hour of filming of a concert I need to produce. The file went corrupted when suddenly the camera stopped. Many many thanks.

[moritzbrachmann]

It might take some tries... For exampel i had a space in my broken files name and so it didnt work. As I closed the space in the title, everything went well and its playing again. You have no idea how much you saved my life! I owe you so much dude

[Ivorycloudfilms]

I keep coming back to this video over and over. Such a brilliant tutorial, easily the most useful video I've ever found on the internet!

[fonsicrabz]

Bruhhh what a big props I have to give you!
This process removed the audio of the video, but I only needed the video, so all good! This is probably different for each case of corrupted file used, but for me it worked just how I wanted to.
To be honest I was skeptical about the process, but everything worked fine.
Good job, nice video!

[DrywaterProductions]

A UI for this would be awesome, but your walkthrough made the command line easy to follow and worked great. I had some distortion at the top of the clip through the duration of the clip but it was better than nothing. Thank you!

[Deitysnectar]

Excellent step by step tutorial. This helped me recover a dash cam video from an accident that I really needed. Thank you so much!

[ProWalks]

This one didn't work for me unfortunately. The original file was 3.3Gb and the new repaired filed was only 66mb . When I ran the final command, I kept getting "Error applying bitstream filters to an output packet for stream #0:1.
It almost worked. :(

My Drone developed a mind of its own this morning and came to a very unpleasant end. I did find it (a minor miracle as it crashed onto a roof and bounced off) but to add insult to injury the video file it was recording, when I lost control, was corrupted.


I found this YouTube video, followed the instructions, and was able able to recover the complete video, from take-off, to roof bounce, to crashing back to earth. The drone looks like it will never fly again, but thanks to GreenBox's video I was able to recover the footage, which has made the loss of the drone easier to live it.


Thank you!

[UCantNinjaMe]

Bro you saved me
Earlier.. I lowkey was going to comment: "how it came out chopped for me; better than nothing" but just in case I tried it again with a more similar mp4 file from my recordings and it worked even better. I watched other videos for a solution and none came close to this video at all. My recording came out flawlessly, but only down side is the audio got chopped but i was planning to talk over it regardless so no loss. Thank you so much... seriously 💓 I was really devastated cuz my computer just error screen out of no where while i was recording too. Thank you so much

[samirahaikal]

You are my savior! Your directions are so clear. It recovered as much as it could... the ends of my files cut off and in some files most of the files were cut off because of my phone's storage running out in the middle of recording. If that didn't happen I'm sure the result would have been perfect. Thank you! :)

[frontphotography]

Took a second try, but worked marvelously! After watching 3 videos in which it was obvious no real effort was made to fix the files, but rather to sell a software, your solution was satisfying and incredibly easy. much obliged!

[BilliardsLover]

Worked for me! Thanks GreenBox! You just saved me some money.

In my case, I had screen-recorded some streaming video overnight, without realizing my drive was so low on space. When I ran out of space, the recorded halted abruptly after capturing about 11 GB of video. I tried a trial version of a Windows-based recover tool that sells for >$50. It was very slow (took almost 30 min.) and ultimately failed to recover much of the video, and what it did recover was poor quality. Your method, on the other hand, recovered all of it in perfect quality, and took far less time (<10 min.), I guess because it runs in the command window.

[POLARICED]

I followed the onscreen cmd instructions but the file couldn't be put together without bunch of errors, makes me wonder if the files were really recovered or not