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I made a recording with 

ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i plughw:0,0  /tmp/audio.mp4

I then moved /tmp/audio.mp4 to another directory (/root/audio.mp4) without stopping ffmpeg leading to a broken .mp4 file:

ffplay /root/audio.mp4
[...]
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f3524000b80] moov atom not found
audio.mp4: Invalid data found when processing input

How to recover and read my .mp4 file?

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2 Answers 2

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29

You can try and use Untrunc to fix the file.

Restore a damaged (truncated) mp4, m4v, mov, 3gp video. Provided you have a similar not broken video.

you may need to compile it from source, but there is another option to use a Docker container and bind the folder with the file into the container and fix it that way.

You can use the included Dockerfile to build and execute the package as a container

git clone https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc.git
cd untrunc
docker build -t untrunc .
docker run -v ~/Desktop/:/files untrunc /files/filea /files/fileb
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4
  • 2
    The Untrunc in the repository provided doesn't compile in Ubuntu 18.04 because of "track.cpp:57:11: fatal error: config.h: No such file or directory". But this fork do compile. github.com/anthwlock/untrunc
    – HD189733b
    Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 7:25
  • Since I found this via google (and I'm aware this is the Unix SE), I'd like to add a Windows program to do this: videohelp.com/software/recover-mp4-to-h264
    – user136036
    Commented Feb 27, 2020 at 17:36
  • Actually, the anthwlock fork linked by @HD189733b above is supposed to work in Windows as well, even includes a GUI. I don't use windows so I can't say more on the matter. It works amazing on Ubuntu 18.04 though.
    – EA304GT
    Commented May 26, 2021 at 14:50
  • To avoid the problem with the missing config.h you can use this fork github.com/anthwlock/untrunc which does not rely of private libav libraries.
    – user1447520
    Commented Oct 14, 2022 at 12:50
10

Solution provided here (https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc) solved my problem! I run it as a Docker container. Here my steps:

  • Install Docker (in case you don't have it yet)

  • Clone the repository:

      git clone https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc

  • On the same directory of the Dockerfile, run:

      cd untrunc
  docker build -t untrunc .

  • That will build a local docker image - it takes time.

  • Now you have to provide a sample file from the same origin (in my case the same camera) and the corrupted file you wanna fix. E.g.:

      docker run -v /path/to/files/:/files untrunc /files/working_video /files/broken_video
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2
  • Doesn't work. Maybe because my videos have different length? I created one video from the other but had to cancel the video generation because it took to long. I guess the canceling while creating the video was the problem. can untrunc fix that too?
    – mcExchange
    Commented Oct 23, 2020 at 8:31
  • 1
    Hi @mcExchange, If you stop the recovering process the same thing will happen to the fixed video.. let it run until the end.
    – Alexandre Andrade
    Commented Dec 27, 2020 at 10:46

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