Home

Video Surgeon is a tool that can be used to help repair MPEG4 and Quicktime video files.

This program has it's origins a long time ago when used to recover footage from a vehicle-mounted camera. Since then I've had to use the same process to recover other videos. Each time I was writing a program to repair just that one video. Now I've decided to create a more versatile solution.

This should work best for cameras which haven't had a chance to "finalize" their footage and use an AVC (the most recent MPEG4) codec. Many of the options are currently "hard coded" in, as this was designed for recovering footage from a single damaged file. As time goes by, I will try and generalise (and clean up) the code so that it will handle more kinds of cameras.

This does not yet support ANY audio. Audio wasn't required for any of the work this was used for, and I didn't have access to any of the standards on the audio codecs. This may change.

The original code was written in MatLab (yes, close to the worst choice for this kind of application). The code has a lot of hallmarks of being badly and rapidly ported. This will be fixed over time. The code was intended originally for forensic use (and intended only as a tool for movie recovery, not as a one-stop-shop). There are plans to create a more user friendly version.

NOTES:
This WILL NOT currently fix audio.
This is an ALPHA release. The more files I can test it on, though, the more stable and better it will become.
There is one commercial product released since this was begun (though this has only been in the public domain a short time, it has it's origins a ways back) which may work for you, and seems to work on a similar principle (but better - I'm one man and not doing this full time!)
I WELCOME complaints and tickets.
This needs two files - the broken file and a working file from the same camera - to function.

IMPORTANT:
Currently if you run the Wizard on a large file, the program appears to crash. This is just because I suck at GUIs and haven't gotten it to update while it is thinking. If it is completely unresponsive, give it a minute or three. If it starts responding again but hasn't saved your file, it didn't work. I will improve this later.

Criticism is welcome, but please keep it constructive. I'm not paid for this, and this is just an alpha release.
Cheers.