old digital videos corrupt?

[sbo80]

So I have some older videos taken with a digital camera about 5 years ago, in .wmv, that have been copied several times across devices, thumb drives etc. Now somewhere in there they've gotten corrupted in some way. They still "play" but extremely slow. For example one is about a 30 second clip, it takes about ten seconds of the progress bar to start actually playing, and then it plays at a frame rate that's very very slow. I hit a stopwatch and it was still playing after 5 minutes. I copied the file to my computer and it still plays the same way, in a couple different video players. All the files on this thumb drive are the same way, about 50 of them. Anybody know if these can be saved? The video player still thinks it's a 30 second clip, so I don't know if trying to use a video editor to speed it up would work. Ideas?

[Robotron2k84]

Sounds like you may actually be missing a driver or codec and the player is driving the rendering in software vs. hardware.

Up to date video drivers and can you tell the codec in the files from the players info view?

[the86d]

"Protester helps police install VLC player"...


Try VLC Media player?

[SkyHawk]

As a test, upload one to Youtube (you can mark it private or unlisted) and see what the result is - does it play normal or still play slow. That will give you some idea if it is your playback hardware/software or something in these files. It will also tell you if it can be fixed easily, if it is something about the file.

When you upload it to Youtube it will be converted to a different format for playback, and that may fix your ability to view them properly.

Uploading them all to Youtube is not the final solution, but if it does fix one of them, then you can look for a batch converter.

[sbo80]

Sounds like you may actually be missing a driver or codec and the player is driving the rendering in software vs. hardware.

even though it's over my head I'm going with this, probably because the camera used to capture the vids was old, even when they were taken in 2013. I get the same results with the Windows "Movies and TV" program and "Windows Media Player". VLC is actually worse, it won't advance a single frame. But I tried the files in my computer's DVD player program, "CyberLink Power Media Player 14" and they play normal. Whatever.

[Robotron2k84]

I think the issue is that those files use the WMV format as a container, but the actual video stream is one of the older video standards that current versions of Windows might no longer support, possibly MPEG-2 or Xvid.

One fix is to load a codec pack into Windows, so that all players that use Windows media framework can play them.

The other option is running them through a video re-encoder. VLC can actually do that, with transcoding. There are other standalone programs to do this as well.