How to scan for .mpeg fragments and turn them into a complete video

camaro76

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Dec 17, 2017
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I had a Panasonic DVD/HDD where I had many movies recorded. In an attempt to transfer the videos to a second hard drive I hooked the drive up to my computer and tried to browse for any video file. But I could not see any files at all, maybe due to a non-supported file system or problem with the index header. After I inserted the drive back into the Panasonic recorder I was not able to see any files at all. So I assume that Windows did alter the index or something. Then I removed the drive from the Panasonic recorder and hooked it up to the computer again, and used a third-party program to extract what was possible from the drive. And I think I got all the data that was on the drive.
Now, the problem described..: Even if I have all the data, ie. all the mpeg segments on a external hard drive, all the movies I had on the 250Gb drive are combined divided into more that 800.000 file segments, and their filename are not numbered in sequence. I can find 10 or even up to 30 segments with filenames in a row that belong together, but then I have to browse through the whole disk to find the next few segments and copy them as well to a new folder. And every time I scroll the windows just a tiny bit, since there are almost a million files, it takes some time before the thumbnails shows up in the window. Quite a pain in the ...
Each mpeg segment is only a fraction of a second long, and to patch a whole movie together (and there are many movies on that drive) will take days and even weeks.

What I need is a program that can recognize / analyze file segments and put them in the right order, regardless of the filename
Of course the change from one scene in a movie to a new scene may be a problem, since there will not be any way the software can know what will be the next scene, but at least if all the video segments that belong in the same scene would be sorted in a row, I can manually organize the order of scenes.

I assume there must be some kind of software that can analyze short video segments and see which one is next in line, but I have failed to find one, even after many hours on the Internet.

I have purchased programs like CnW Recovery and many other programs that are supposed to do forensic analyzing and so on, but absolutely no program has been able to even remotely do the job, but rather tend to list the file segments I already have, but under a new name.
Is there such a program out there, and what is the name of it (or names in case more than one piece of software are up to it...)?

To make the scenario even worse, now and then one of the file segments (even if they are in a row regarding filename) has another file name extension then.mpeg and has a length of 0.000 second (but it can still play as the other files that has a .mpeg file, even if it's supposed to be only 0.000 second long, so it is not zero length...).
Due to this I can not use a regular joiner program to stitch the video segments I have found together. That is, I have tried many programs but all of them have failed to join the normal .mpeg files and the other zero-length files together.

Any suggestions?
 
Solution
You may have run afoul of some anti-piracy protection method when you attempted to copy the movies.

Or that "third party" software was either poorly written and/or buggy.

Not to mention what all may have happened if there were proprietary disk formats involved.

If the software did not, or did not properly sequence the file/video "fragments" then the videos are unlikely to be repairable. Especially if the original videos were fragmented into millions of little files.

Very likely a lost cause.
You may have run afoul of some anti-piracy protection method when you attempted to copy the movies.

Or that "third party" software was either poorly written and/or buggy.

Not to mention what all may have happened if there were proprietary disk formats involved.

If the software did not, or did not properly sequence the file/video "fragments" then the videos are unlikely to be repairable. Especially if the original videos were fragmented into millions of little files.

Very likely a lost cause.
 
Solution