Recover not properly burned DVD from camcoder

Question

Can anybody suggest to me any good, and preferably free, software - working on Vista / 7 - for recovering content from DVD disks?

A few DVD-R VOB files cannot be read from disk by Windows. Probably the camera failed to burn it correctly.

What I want to achieve is to skip a few invalid frames in VOB files and recreate proper a MPEG stream - without re-encoding the whole stream and losing the quality.

Answer 1

What you want without a doubt is ISOBuster - it's IMHO the best optical disc recovery program. That should be able to get any data on the disc off it and into a usable format.

IF your VOB files are still corrupt you can try using FFMpeg to reencode the video.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

I had a problem similar to yours, 3-4 years a go, with a sony camera, so the following advices did work for me.

First, look for an application to get the corrupted data from your dvd like said by Mark Pim. ISOBuster is really the best app in my opinion to recover data.

After recovering your data from disc, backup it to do the video editing only in a copy (so if you need to do more editing you already recovered the files from your damaged dvd-r disc avoiding data re-extraction).

After the backup, use VideoRedo to fix your vob mpeg2 files without reencoding.

With VideoReDo's perfected smart rendering technology you can edit again and again without degrading any of your precious videos.

(These are all windows based approaches)

Answer 3

You might give a try to Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier:

Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file were not recoverable in the end.

Answer 4

I have no idea on the format of VOB files and if they can be recovered, but before anything else, I would try VLC Media Player as I have had success reading from various other sorts of corrupted media files.

Answer 5

In the unlikely event that ISOBuster doesn't work out for you, I can also suggest a program called ProjectX. You can strip the raw mpeg+audio out of VOBs with it as well.

Videohelp has links to the sourceforge page as well as compiled and portable versions.