[mythtv-users] Important recoding damaged - anything I can do?

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Damian <myth at surr.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 28/06/12 4:26 PM, Nick Rout wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Damian<myth at surr.co.uk>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hello all,
>>>>
>>>> My kids were on a BBC1 TV program about Glastonbury festival a couple of
>>>> years ago. The recoding has survived various Myth problems and
>>>> re-installs,
>>>> but I now fear that I've lost it for good.
>>>>
>>>> I have tried and failed to 'export' this file into a more usable format
>>>> several times over the years I have had it. Exporting a recording from
>>>> MythTV seems to be one of the hardest things to do for some reason, but
>>>> I'm
>>>> not here to complain. Just want to see if there's anything I can do from
>>>> here.
>>>>
>>>> I got the impression from a recent thread that creating a cut list and
>>>> trascoding a recording with 'lossless' quality would create an MPG file
>>>> (as
>>>> opposed to an nuv). I did that a few days ago. The job seemed to take a
>>>> very
>>>> long time, but I was happy to see that it was no longer in the job queue
>>>> the
>>>> following morning.
>>>>
>>>> Running mythlink.pl showed me that the file was still an nuv file.
>>>>
>>>> Last night, I thought I'd try it again, but found a problem. The
>>>> recording
>>>> is still there from within MythTV, but only partially. If I play the
>>>> recording, it just closes after about 15 minutes. I obviously tried this
>>>> several times and have also tried playing the file using VLC from a
>>>> Windows
>>>> machine. The file seems to be damaged.
>>>>
>>>> I doubt there's anything that I can do, but would love to hear if any
>>>> recovery is possible.
>>>
>>> I assume you don't have the original file from before you did the
>>> transcode to nuv?
>>>
>>> Anyway have you tried something like
>>>
>>> ffmpeg -i damagedfile.nuv -vcodec copy -acodec copy newfile.nuv
>>>
>>>
>> Similarly, mencoder may be able to help with the forceidx flag to rebuild
>> the index if the data is there, for example this script:
>>
>> http://www.mattgrill.com/2009/03/converting-nuv-mythtv-video-to-avi-divx-without-transcoding/
>>
>>    |#!/bin/bash|
>>    |video="$1"|
>>    |mencoder -ni -oac mp3lame -ovc copy -vf harddup -noskip
>>    -skiplimit 0 -o test.avi "$video"|
>>    |mv "$video" "$video.done"|
>>    |newvideo="${video/%nuv/avi}"|
>>    |mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy -aspect 16:9 -o
>>    "$newvideo" test.avi|
>>    |rm test.avi|
>>
>> It would be worth hunting in the logs to see if you can find any reference
>> to this transcode job, see if any error was reported.
>>
>> I would also make a backup copy of whatever copies of the file you still
>> have before running ffmpeg/mencoder/anything on it, just in case anything
>> else goes wrong and makes it worse. Depending on how much other writing's
>> happenned to the drive, you could even look into un-delete tools to see if
>> you can get the original back ( I personally haven't tried this on linux, so
>> can't really help much here ).
>>
>> Andrew
>
>
> Update,
>
> An incredibly kind stranger called John from this newsgroup found a place
> where I could download the file. A quick torrent later and I have the
> footage of my family back.
>
> Needless to say, I am incredibly grateful!!

I'm not sure we are supposed to talk about that sort of method of
obtaining material around here.

But i must say when myth fails, it is sometimes necessary!