[mythtv-users] H264 conversion of interlaced MPEG2?

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Mon, 4 May 2015 21:12:06 -0500
    > From: dennis <deg at outlook.com>

    > If you plan on streaming the video to a mobile device,  you also want to 
    > move 'moov atom' to the beginning of the file, so it can utilize 
    > faststart.   This allows the video to start streaming before the entire 
    > file is transferred.   ( -movflags faststart ).

Somewhat off-topic:  Is an H264 stream missing the moov atom recoverable?

I have a streamed lecture, recorded to H264 MP4 via VLC, during which
the stream went away at the end.  VLC apparently failed to terminate
the recording correctly, and attempts to play it fail in both mplayer
("moov atom not found") and VLC (a lonely cone).

I had an earlier recording of a different segment with the same
recording parameters; naively trying to prepend the first 1KB or 1MB
of a working recording to the broken one (after first removing the
same number of bytes) didn't work, which was unsurprising.
Concatenating working-to-broken played the working segment but not the
broken one.  (I was assuming a header that gets fixed up later, not a
missing trailer.)  Googling was unsatisfactory, except perhaps for a
for-pay Windows program (and sneaky workarounds for the "pay" part),
none of which I've tried 'cause even booting Windows is a hassle.

Am I just SOL here?

(Except for alignment issues, perhaps "cat bad good > both; qt-faststart..."
might do something, but I somehow doubt it. :)

P.S.  I wised up and started recording to ogg instead of H264 after
that; it appears that ogg doesn't have an "all or nothing" approach
to video and lets me play the video while it's being written instead
of only after VLC is finished with it, etc.  But that still leaves
me out of luck on the broken piece I've got.