Just sharing with the community. I just had an event where I was recording 3 ISO channels in .MP4. The power was kicked 80mins in mid recording. The file was corrupt but the file size remained. I used Wondershare Repairit (paid) and it recovered the files!
Hello Cloudcast,
Thank you for sharing this with our community, though I’m sorry you ran into this issue! We do see this sometimes, when a Pearl loses power during a recording it’s likely that the recording will be corrupted. Usually it’s just a corruption of the container or wrapper around the actual video data. In this case certain tools can restore the wrapper and make the video functional again, albeit usually with some data loss. The data loss is normally not more than a few seconds in our experience.
We have found this third-party tool works quite well usually, https://github.com/anthwlock/untrunc. It does require that you have both the corrupted file and a functional one. Essentially it copies the functional wrapper over the corrupted one, restoring access to the video content. For best results we suggest using a reference file recorded on the same Pearl using the same Encoding settings as the corrupted file.
In cases where power loss may be more likely we recommend that folks record using the MP4-Fragmented file type. This is a much more fault tolerant file type and the risk of data loss and corruption is somewhat lower with this type. Just please be aware that some software may have difficulty with MP4-Fragmented and may require additional configuration to get it to work, or in some cases converting to a more widely compatible file type.