Video recorded from phone is corrupted. What are my options?

[frozensummer]

I have no idea what to do.  mp4 videos that I recorded from my phone are corrupted.

 

I used a demo software  Grau GmbH, and it WORKED pretty well, but I need something free.

 

Also, is my phone messed up?  Will this happen in the future?

 

Please help.  Thank you!

 

 

 

[CWB]

the quickest way to tell if the phone itself is "messed up" is to take a video and see what you get .

will it happen again in the future ? ... if it is ok now , there is no way to tell if it will happen again (get those lottery numbers if you can tell) .

 

to "repair" a mpg , avi or what-have-you is a matter of "how corrupted is the data" ; the simple analogy :

think of a 35mm color negative ... if you snip a little piece out of one corner , it is really not much data lost ... you could get by .

if you took a knife or sand paper and scratched the negative severely ... the whole of the picture will be messed up ...

virtually impossible to "repair" .

 

a data file for a video frame is complicated ... there is a lot of stuff going on .

certain programs can fix some errors (say , a missing key frame) , but in some cases so much data or certain very important data is corrupted that/and there is no fix for it .