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

[Damian]

On 29/06/2012 00:28, Nick Rout wrote:
> 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!
>

That's why I didn't mention anyone's name in full :-)