Effective Video Repair Methods: Your Ultimate Guide
Videos play an important role in today’s digital era, whether it’s capturing your precious memories or showcasing professional work. However, instances such as file transfer errors, sudden system crashes, or corrupted headers can corrupt or damage your video files, ultimately destroying your viewing experience. When that happens, it’s important to immediately act with adequate video repair methods to repair the file rather than losing the content altogether.
This ultimate guide explores different effective video repair methods that you can try to fix your corrupt/damaged videos and regain their content. Whether you’re dealing with choppy playback, codec issues, broken file structures, or totally unreadable videos, these methods will help you in easy and quick video repairing. Let’s get started!
Understanding Common Reasons for Video Corruption/Damage
Before jumping to effective video repair methods, it’s important to find the exact cause of your corrupt videos. Some main reasons include:
- Interrupted File Transfers: Disconnecting the USB drive or other storage media during file transfer may result in incomplete transfer or corruption issues.
- Sudden Power Failure: Unexpected system shutdown while recording or saving a video can damage the file header or metadata.
- Faulty Storage Media: Your storage device may develop bad sectors due to continuous usage for a long time, which can corrupt all the stored files, including your videos.
- Codec Issues: A video may appear damaged simply because your system cannot decode the format properly.
- Malicious Program Attacks: Malicious programs like viruses or malware can damage video metadata, causing playback issues, errors, or corrupted files that may require repair tools.
Preliminary Quick Fixes to Repair Videos
Now that you know some basic reasons for your video corruption, it’s time to jump to adequate repair approaches. Before we begin with advanced methods, let’s perform some basic checks:
1: Try Playing Videos in a Different Media Player
It may be your video player which is causing the problem while playing videos. In such a case, you can try other video playing tools. For this, you can use:
- VLC Media Player
- MPV
- PotPlayer
These programs often support a wider range of formats than default players. VLC is, in fact, a versatile tool that not only plays your videos but also helps fix minor corruption issues with ease.
2: Convert Your Video File Format
Instances may occur when your media player won’t support the specific file format of your video. In such cases, you can try converting your video file format using Windows’ built-in VLC media player to third-party converters such as HandBrake, FFmpeg, etc.
3: Try Re-Downloading/Re-Transfer of Videos
If your video is unplayable due to any error during downloading or transferring it between devices, re-downloading or re-copying the file might solve missing fragment issues.
How to Repair Videos on Your PC? [Quick Methods]
Once you are done with the aforementioned basic fixes and the issue persists, go with the following advanced video repair methods:
Method 01: Use VLC In-Built Feature
VLC Media Player is a versatile tool that, along with playing your videos of different file formats, supports repairing them by fixing minor corruption issues. VLC can fix videos when the problem mainly lies in damaged or missing video indexes, format-specific issues, especially with AVI files, etc. To repair your videos using VLC, you’ve to:
- Launch the VLC player on your Windows PC.
- Go to Tools > Preferences, then navigate to the Input/Codecs tab.
- Scroll down and tap the drop-down next to “Damaged or incomplete AVI file”.
- Select “Always Fix” from the dropdown and click Save to apply the changes.
Once done, VLC will automatically attempt to repair your videos. If the corruption is minor, the file will usually play smoothly afterwards.
Method 02: Repair Videos Using FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a powerful, open-source command-line tool widely used for video processing, conversion, and repair. This tool gives you more control over video reconstruction, making it ideal for addressing file corruption, playback errors, missing indexes, or broken headers. To repair videos using FFmpeg, you have to:
- Firstly, download and install FFmpeg on your device.
- Go to the following path using the cd command: cd /path/to/video/folder to find your corrupted videos.
- To fix minor corruption, copy the video and audio streams into a new container: ffmpeg -i corrupted.mp4 -c copy repaired.mp4.
- If the audio/video sync or playback problems keep existing, type the command: ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -i corrupted.mp4 -c copy output.mp4.
- If the video is still unplayable, re-encode it using: ffmpeg -i corrupted.mp4 -preset fast output.mp4.
Method 03: Repair Videos Using Online Video Repair Tool
If your video error keeps existing even after the aforementioned video repair methods, the best solution is for you to use an online tool to repair your corrupt videos. Stellar Online Video Repair is one of the best and easy to use online tools for all video repair needs. This web-based tool supports repairing videos damaged due to multiple reasons, including broken or missing headers, distorted video frames, audio-video sync errors, and many more.
Key Features of the Stellar Online Video Repair Tool:
- It supports repairing damaged videos of different file formats, including MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, FLV, etc.
- It rebuilds damaged parts of the file using unique internal data structures.
- This online video repair tool allows you to preview the repaired videos before saving them on your device.
- The whole repair process can be executed directly from the web; no need to install any third-party software.
Here’s how to repair videos using Stellar Online Video Repair:
Step 1: Visit the official website of the Stellar Online Video Repair tool and click Upload Video to add the corrupt/damaged videos you need to repair.
Step 2: Click Start Repair and wait till the software scans for video structure, metadata, and frame-level issues.
Step 3: Once the videos are repaired, click the Save Repaired Video button to save the repaired videos on your device.
Final Thoughts
Video corruption can be frustrating, especially while playing them. Thankfully, there are several video repair methods and third-party tools available to repair and restore your videos. Start with simple fixes like changing video file format, trying different players, etc., then move to powerful online video repair tools such as Stellar Online Video Repair to fix your videos. Moreover, you can consider tips to prevent video corruption like safely ejecting your storage device, keeping device OS and installed apps updated, etc., to avoid corruption moving forward.
Further Reading
