repair.video

Phone video corrupted or won't play? Here's the free diagnosis

Phone recordings break in a couple of specific ways more than any other device we see, and knowing which one you have decides whether we need anything from you besides the broken file. Here's the honest diagnosis, in plain terms.

What actually happened to the file

The two shapes we see most often are:

• The index was never written. The phone died, ran out of storage, the recording app was killed mid-record, or a transfer to your computer got cut short. The picture and sound are sitting on the phone or the card — the moov index that maps them for a player never got written, or got cut off along with the rest of the file. This is the same underlying failure as a camera dying mid-recording, and the fix is the same: rebuild the index from the raw frames, ref-free.
• The recording is HEVC and the container is gone entirely. iPhones and newer Android phones commonly record in HEVC (H.265, often labeled hvc1). When the container is completely missing, the codec settings that describe how to decode the picture live only in that missing index — there's nothing in-stream to recover them from. For this shape we need a healthy clip from the same phone, in the same recording mode (same codec, resolution and frame rate) as a template. An H.264 clip from the same phone doesn't supply what an HEVC file needs — we saw exactly this on a real job: the customer's reference was recorded in H.264 while the broken file was HEVC, and the honest answer was "send a clip recorded with the same settings," not "send another reference."

A third, unrelated failure: some "videos" saved from a messaging or social app are actually a web page saved under a video-looking filename, not a video file at all. We detect this directly — there's no video data in the file, it's HTML or JSON underneath — and tell you plainly to go back and download the actual video file, not the page around it.

What we can rebuild

For the first shape — index missing, frames intact — recovery is usually possible without any reference file at all, and audio is recovered alongside video by default rather than dropped for convenience. A real example: a 583 MB, 2016 Android recording of a concert came back as 4 minutes 20 seconds of video with its soundtrack intact. For the second shape — HEVC with the container gone — a matching reference clip from the same phone and mode unlocks the same rebuild.

What we honestly cannot fix

• HEVC files with no matching reference. If your phone can't supply a healthy clip recorded in the same mode, we'll say so plainly rather than guess at codec settings.
• Files that are all zeros, encrypted, or reassembled wrong by a recovery tool. These are separate failure shapes — see recovered video won't play for how we tell them apart.
• A "video" that's actually a saved web page. There's no video data to recover in these — go back to the source and download the real file.

Do this first

• Copy the file off the phone with a cable or the phone's own Files app — not through a chat app. Messaging apps commonly re-encode video on send, which throws away the exact bytes a repair needs.
• Keep a second clip from the same phone in the same recording mode as a possible reference — you may not need it, but it costs nothing to have ready.
• Leave the phone model in the email field when you upload, if you'd like a reply — it helps match the right recovery path faster.

Free while in beta — no account, no card. You pay only if we hand back a file that actually plays. If it can't be recovered, we say so plainly.

Frequently asked questions

Video recorded on my phone won't play — is it corrupted?

Usually yes, in the specific sense that its index (the map players use to find each frame) is missing or incomplete — not that the footage itself is destroyed. The most common cause is the phone dying, running out of storage, or the recording app being killed mid-record. The free analysis tells you which shape your file is.

iPhone MOV won't open on my PC — what's going on?

iPhone recordings are frequently HEVC (H.265), which not every PC player supports out of the box — that's a codec-support problem, separate from corruption. If the file plays on the phone itself, try a player with HEVC support. If it won't play anywhere, including on the phone, that's the container-missing case this page covers.

I transferred the video and it stopped working — same problem?

It can be, but the fix is different: a cut-short transfer slices off the file's tail, where the index usually lives. If the original still exists at the source, re-transferring it completely is the whole fix. Recovery only makes sense once the source copy is gone.

My phone died while recording — can that video be recovered?

Depends which recording format. For H.264 recordings, the index can often be rebuilt from the broken file alone. For HEVC (most recent iPhones), we need a healthy clip from the same phone in the same recording mode to supply the missing codec settings. Tell us which one you have and we'll tell you what's needed.

Do you need my other videos?

Only one, and only for the HEVC-container-missing case: a healthy clip from the same phone, recorded in the same mode. It's used only for that job.

Will I get the sound back?

Usually, yes — audio is recovered alongside video by default, not dropped for convenience. We only ship video without sound when there's genuinely nothing decodable left of the audio track, and we say so on the result rather than staying quiet about it.