Here Is How You Can Fix Damaged GoPro Video Files

When it comes to capturing the most exciting moments of your extreme sports activities, such as wakeboarding, surfing, bungee jumping, skydiving, motorcycle racing, mountain biking, you name it, there is no a better solution than to take an action camera with you. Among the most popular and widely spread action cameras these days are various models of the GoPro cameras. Although there are a handful of competitors, GoPro was the first camera of its kind and the one that made the revolution in the industry. And it still holds the leading positions on the market.

A great impact on the GoPro’s successes has their outstanding marketing efforts. They managed to unite the progressive extreme sports community around them and continue to follow this strategy quite effectively. Take their yearly million-dollar video challenges, for example. Personally, after watching the final film (made as a compilation of the clips that won the challenge), I was about to go and buy the latest model of the GoPro – Hero7.   

But are GoPro cameras really that good? Their key advantages are being compact, durable and waterproof. They also produce acceptable image quality, especially considering the small size of the camera. One of the greatest and most remarkable features of the Hero7 is its electronic image stabilizer – HyperSmooth. With this stabilizer, you don’t need any gimbals anymore, and yet produce steady, professional-looking video clips.   

The downside of the GoPros’ complex technologies packed into a small box is their pure reliability. This is especially true with their latest models – GoPro Hero7 Black. For example, one of the most common issues is when the camera records a still image instead of a video. You may have a video file that consists of video frames all made of a one single image shot. At the same time, the audio stream may work fine. Form GoPro community discussions, it looks like this is a hardware issue, not a firmware glitch.    

There is also another issue when one or several video files downloaded from your GoPro camera may appear to be corrupted. But this issue is not specific to GoPro cameras. A video file may get damaged when the recording wasn’t finished properly. For example, you could forget to stop the recording and power off your GoPro camera. Or, the battery could have died unexpectedly when the camera was recording a video file. Again, this issue is not specific to GoPro, but rather a generic issue that can hit a video file when it’s not finitized properly on any camcorder or DSLR.    

While there are no solutions to recover video files that have been hit with the “still image” issue described above, you can repair corrupted GoPro video files that have been damaged as a result of interrupted recording. According to this great article from Restore.Media’s blog, all you have to do to fix a broken GoPro video file, is to rebuild the file’s header (and, possibly, index).    

All the latest GoPro models record video files in the MP4 format. MP4 video files contain video and audio data, as well as indices and headers. Indices allow media players to locate needed parts of the video clip when you use the fast forward or rewind buttons, or scroll the video with the time slider. Headers in MP4 files contain metadata, such as video resolution, frame rate, but rate, codecs, etc.    

Headers are usually saved at the end of the video files. If the video recording was interrupted unexpectedly, your GoPro camera may not be able to save the header in the video file. If this is the case, you won’t be able to play back such a corrupted video. This is because media players need data from the header section to open the file.   But since video and audio data have been recorded by the camera, you can repair your damaged GoPro video files simply by re-constructing their header sections.   

Of course, it’s not that easy to do as it may sound. To fix a broken GoPro video, you would have to extract metadata from the header of a valid video file recorded on the same camera and with the exact same settings, as the damaged one. Then build a new header based on the extracted data. And then insert this new header into the corrupted video.   

This is quite a time-consuming process, which requires appropriate knowledge in video editing/engineering. Luckily, though, there are tools that can repair GoPro videos for you with just a few clicks.   

One such tool is Restore.Media. It’s a great online tool that works wonders. To start using Restore.Media, all you have to do is to create a free account, then upload a sample video along with the broken video file and let the tool do the rest. I was able to fix my broken GoPro videos within just a few minutes. For the sample, I used the video file recorded prior to the corrupted one. If you don’t have such, you can shoot a new sample video with your GoPro. The longest part was to wait until the files are uploaded, while the fixing process was quite swift. The price is also more than acceptable. To fix my GoPro video file of around 30 minutes, I had to pay just a few bucks. All in all, I’d highly suggest you to try Restore.Media if you’ve got some damaged GoPro videos that you can’t play back in media players.    

I hope, knowing about these issues, you’ll be more careful when shooting videos with your GoPro. Despite its durability, there are still cases when you may end up with a broken video file. Just remember to finish the recording properly prior to powering off your GoPro camera.