Friday, August 22, 2014

Viewing H264 raw video files

This is a very useful link I would like to share.

Often one has a video file that one cannot view - maybe from a CCTV system.  It is quite common to be H264 or similar, but does not have a standard wrapper, eg .MOV, or .MP4.

The very good free program VLC does have a feature to allow you to do this.  The following Youtube link does describe how to

As a very quick summary, the following may help

Select
  1.   Tools
  2.   Preferences
  3.   At the bottom select 'All'
  4.   In Stream output  select 'Demuxers'
  5.   Then select the  Mux module  - (Automatic is the default)

Monday, August 11, 2014

Companies that promise something they cannot provide

I am not going to name names, but recently I have several reports from my satisfied customers moaning about other companies who have taken their money for software that cannot do what they say.  The main focus is on recovery of video deleted from the camera memory chip.

As I have written here several times, when video is recorded in the camera, the physical sequence of data is different to the logical sequence, the video is written in fragments, but the FAT keeps track of the logical order.  When the file is deleted, this sequence is also lost.  Recovery is complex and cannot be done by simple data carving.

If a video is written to a hard drive, it will normally be sequential and thus a data carving approach to recovery will often work.  I believe that software companies just test hard disk deletions and say it will work.  I have tried a few demo products with my 'favourite' GoPro camera images.  They fall flat on their face.  The software will report files, that look the correct size, but will never ever be viewable.

From CnW Recovery point of view, I have an uphill struggle (on a low budget) to let potentials users know that there is a product that will have a very high success rate of recovery of MP4, MOV, AVI, MTS videos that have been deleted from the camera memory chip.

It is a shame that the internet has to boast and boast even when something does not work.  At CnW, not everything works, but there is always free backup to resolve the problem - fairly quickly.