[MPlayer-users] can mplayer/mencoder fix a broken file?

[Mark Blain]

Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote in
news:921974.74384.qm at web52612.mail.re2.yahoo.com: 

> 
> Dear fellow mplayer users,
> 
> A friend recovered a file from a dying windows machine(hard drive
> failure), and can not view it with any video player out there, Windows
> Media, DivX, vlc and Quicktime.  I told him that mplayer can view it,
> but I lied to him, here is the proof.  
> 
> [olivares at localhost 28DC-C195]$ mplayer file000401.avi 
> MPlayer SVN-r29109-4.4.0 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
> 
> Playing file000401.avi.
> libavformat file format detected.
> LAVF: no audio or video headers found - broken file?
> 
> 
> Exiting... (End of file)
> 
> Now that mplayer can see the file and has told us that the file is
> broken, is there any magical way to fix it so that the file can be
> seen? 
> 
> Thanks in Advance,
> 
> Antonio 

Here's something to try.
 
http://thomas.mansi.free.fr/blog/spip.php?article12
"Read raw videos with MPlayer"
mplayer -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo w=WIDTH:h=HEIGHT VIDEO