Python Tools for Decrypting Corrupt MP4 Metadata for video files that refuse to open or play back correctly
This has been written due to a data corruption event that occurred on 04/10/2022 @ 10pm BST
involving a 15 minute video recording in OBS Studio of the video game Astroneer.
The audio has saved correctly but the video has not and is missing.
Windows Metadata shows blank for width, height, etc...
FFMPEG fails to re-encode it with the copy codec.
The original videofile is 3GB.
A shorter version has
been included.
There are a lack of available tools to decode and correctly repair corrupt media manually
and as the screenshots show, data is still fairly integral but still fails to be played back.
This has been written in the hope that you could use a utility like HxD Hex Editor
to fix and recover corrupted digital media files that were encoded incorrectly at source.
The solution was found in this case to be an invalid stsz header size set to 0
by OBS Studio to indicate an encoding failure. Calculating the number of bytes between
the stsz and stco headers (for video, not audio) and then placing this hex number in the
32-bit (4-byte) gap before the bytes for stsz fixed the video making it half playable.
The result of this recovery process is available to watch on YouTube at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zqy77Wgc-I