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

[Michael T. Dean]

On 06/28/2012 02:45 AM, Damian wrote:
> On 28/06/2012 07:26, Nick Rout wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Damian 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
>>
>> ?
>>
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> Stupidly, I seem not to have a copy of the file!!
>
> I have just run:
>
> ffmpeg -i 1002_20090627161700.nuv -vcodec copy -acodec copy newfile.nuv
>
> from inside the recordings directory and got this returned:
>
> ffmpeg version 0.8.3-4:0.8.3-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 
> the Libav developers
>   built on Jun 12 2012 16:37:58 with gcc 4.6.3
> *** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
> This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in 
> a future release. Please use avconv instead.
> [nuv @ 0x831f260] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be 
> inaccurate
>
> Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 
> 1000.00 (1000/1) -> 25.00 (25/1)
> Input #0, nuv, from '1002_20090627161700.nuv':
>   Duration: 00:21:24.66, start: 0.040000, bitrate: 1411 kb/s
>     Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x576, PAR 64:45 DAR 16:9, 
> 25 fps, 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
>     Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 1411 kb/s
> Unable to find a suitable output format for 'newfile.nuv'
>
> Is that useful?
>
> Thanks for looking into this for me!

Had you enabled the setting to keep original files after transcoding?  
If so, you will have a ".old" file in your recording directory.

find /path/to/recordings -name '*.old' -print

Mike