Guide
The video someone sent me won't open
It arrived on WhatsApp, by email or through a link: the file is there but won't play.
First of all: ask them to send it again
It sounds obvious and it's the answer in most cases. A video that arrives half-way is a file shorter than the original, with the same name and the same icon: no warning, no error during the transfer. Whoever sent it still has the intact original on their phone.
If they resend it, ask them to use a link — WeTransfer, Drive, iCloud — rather than an attachment or the chat itself: messaging apps re-compress videos and shorten them, and on large files transfers break more often.
How an interrupted transfer shows itself
The sign is always the same: the file claims more data than it holds. Inside a video it's written how long the picture block is, and if the transfer stopped that number doesn't add up. The free check above compares the two and tells you straight away, with the exact number of missing bytes.
The other case is a video the app re-compressed badly, or one saved while the connection dropped. The result looks similar: a file that plays for a few seconds and stops, or won't start at all.
First things first: is your file recoverable?
The check takes two seconds, it's free, and the video is never uploaded anywhere: the analysis runs inside your browser, on your own computer.
See if it's recoverableWhat not to do, under any circumstances
- Don't delete the truncated file before you've received a good one: if the original is gone, what you have is all that's left.
- Don't ask for it zipped: if the video is already damaged, the zip preserves the damage.
- Don't save it over itself repeatedly from different sources.
- Don't trust the thumbnail: many apps show the first frame even for incomplete files.
If the original is gone
It happens: the phone that shot it was wiped, or the video was deleted after sending. At that point the piece that arrived is all there is, and it's worth working on.
A truncated file is recovered up to the point the data reaches: you get the part that's there, and what's missing is only the tail. Often that's nearly the whole video, because transfers tend to break near the end.
Questions I get every time
On WhatsApp the video played, then I saved it and now it won't open.
The save was interrupted. The video may still be in the chat: download it again from there, and if it disappears ask for it to be resent before it expires.
The file is the right size but still won't play.
Then it isn't the transfer: the video was recorded badly in the first place. The free check tells the two cases apart in two seconds.
Can I get the original quality back if it came through WhatsApp?
No, and nobody can: the chat's compression throws data away and it doesn't come back. What gets recovered is the file as it arrived. For full quality you need the original from the phone that shot it.
If you'd rather I handled it
You send me the file and the reference video, I send you a preview of the recovered one, and only then do you decide whether to pay. Twenty euros per video, thirty-five for up to five files from the same device.
You only pay if the video turns up.