Fixing Corrupted Video Captured by Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Android Pie 9

Many of us have experienced getting corrupted videos when using recording features of our phones or cameras. The causes of this annoying experience come from various sources: faulty Micro SD cards, errors in camera software, flat batteries, etc.

I own 2 Android phones, Motorola XT720 (Android 2.3) and Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (Android 9.0). Both have shown faults related to Micro SD cards. A couple of days ago, I recorded a 30 minutes video using the default camera app of my Samsung Galaxy Note 8. The SD card was then shown as corrupted in the phone storage management system. My recorded video now is just a file without extension in the SD card, 'temp_video'. This file is not viewable in any popular video viewers including the powerful VLC media player. Luckily, the Micro SD card is perfectly accessible on my computer.

I looked around on the Internet to find a quick and cheap way to recover my video from the corrupted file temp_video. Based on what I read, the content of the video is actually captured in the temp_video file. The most common reason that the file is not readable is the missing metadata associated to the file. This metadata may include the information about the camera and format of the video (e.g., mp4). Luckily this metadata can be retrieved from the non corrupted video files taken from the same device. In my case, the other successfully recorded videos by my Galaxy Note 8 are all in mp4 format.

I have successfully recovered my video using the software Do-It-Yourself Video Repair Tool (VRT). The free version of the software only recovers half of the video. The trick to overcome this limitation is to make a copy of your file and combine the two files into one file. This way, half of the file is basically your full video. Different operating systems have different free tools for concatenating files together into one file. If you have access to Windows computer you can use this CMD command line to combine two files.

copy /b temp_video + temp_video_copy.mp4 temp_video_double.mp4

I have shown you how to 'trick' the free version of the VRT software. But if you have many corrupted videos or you plan to use the software VRT often, please consider to pay for the software to support its developers. By purchasing the software, you also can save the time and effort to clone and combine corrupted files with the technique that I described above. I would also like to say thank you for the questions and answers in this online discussion.

My final advice for fellow Android users is that the SD cards are not reliably managed by Android phones. I decided to only use the internal storage of my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 from now to avoid future issues with the external storage and Android. My Micro SD card is perfectly fine; after taking out all the photos and videos, I have formatted it with the standard SD Memory Card Formatter (by the SD Association) to use for other purposes.