The VideoLAN Forums

I have a couple of questions with the issue I'm having which is while watching streams and recording them VLC player will crash with no error message. If you only have the answer to one of these questions that would still be appreciated.

First off I have successfully been able to watch and record streams from the internet but when I want to record and come back later I find that if I leave it recording long enough VLC player will crash (with no error message) and the video it was recording is corrupted.

1. Is there a secret to allowing long recording sessions without VLC crashing?

2. Is there a way to use a more resilient format instead of MP4 that won't corrupt when the VLC client crashes and it can't write whatever finishing data it apparently needs to write or is there a setting for mp4 file that won't make it so dependant on pushing the finishing record button? Like something that would write index data into the file periodically that might make the file slightly bigger but still work if VLC crashes?

3. Given that it must not write much data to the file when you push the record button to turn recording off is there a program that can fix mp4 files if most of the file intact up to the point where VLC crashed? I've seen videorepair but when I tried it, it took a stream that was over 2 hours long and "repaired" it to be only a little over 2 minutes and the result was severely degraded video that was virtually unwatchable, I just can't believe that a file that was completely fine up until the very end could only be restored in such a sub acceptable way. I mean until VLC crashes the data that is being written is in tact, in a 1 GB video file we are talking about less than 0.01 percent of the file data missing turns the whole thing into a corrupted unplayable file.

1. yes, change codec and mux

2. transcode and use ts mux

3. mp4box.

1. yes, change codec and mux

2. transcode and use ts mux

3. mp4box.

Well first off thank you for replying.

I now have questions about your answer

Would I change the codec and mux in the input & codec preferences of VLC? If so what are the fields called and what should they be set to so that I get the desired result which is VLC not crashing but if it crashes the video will still be playable?

Are transcode and TS mux seperate programs from VLC or are they settings in VLC?

I downloaded GPAC and installed it. I looked at the MP4Box section of the website and in the MP4box section I don't see examples of what you would do if you wanted to repair an mp4 file. Is there a website that explains how to repair a file with MP4? I guess will search google to see if I can find it.

Well I downloaded this http://www.videohelp.com/tools/My-MP4Box-GUI and when I tried to open the file it said "File contains no known audio, video, subtitle or chapter stream." Does that mean mp4box can't help me?

Use convert option in the UI.

Transcode and mux are options of VLC.

If gpac hates you, you're screwed, indeed. Except if they play in VLC.

Use convert option in the UI.

Transcode and mux are options of VLC.

If gpac hates you, you're screwed, indeed. Except if they play in VLC.

Just to clarify if you didn't catch what I'm trying to do, I'm not trying to stream to other people, I'm trying to capture a stream, so I don't know if transcode or mux is what I want but if they are then where do I change those settings and what should I change them to?

Also I took a look at the convert/save option. Would I open a stream and then use the convert/save option to choose the file format? Are you saying that if I do it that way VLC player will be less likely to crash? What is the best choice if I want the file to be playable in the event that VLC does crash? I see lots of options, multiple types of ASF, MP4, webm, ts, ogg etc.

I did a test where I started a stream and started recording. I then used task manager to quit the VLC and it has the same issue as the other 2 much larger files, it says there is no known video or audio. Is it really possible that it not writing that small amount of information to the file completely ruins the rest of it beyond repair? Has anyone else figured out what to do if VLC crashes while recording a stream?

Hey - did you ever get a solution to this? I'm looking too

i'm not sure if this is the right place for this question/remark. if the moderators know a more suitable place could you please move this post there.

i have had a often recurring problem of the VLC crashing over and over again during the past three days when i was re-recording pieces of some really long videos. i first thought that there maybe was something wrong with the originals. however, today my VLC was streaming a webcamera and it crashed during the recording of a rather interesting event. therefore i now think that the problem must be with VLC and not with my pc (which has Windows 7) or the videos which i was making recordings of. please can someone fix this crash - crash problem? i have now downgraded my VLC to 2.0.3 Twoflower. i hadn't even known that it had been upgraded. can upgrading happen automatically??

does anyone know a way to fix a recording which has ended abruptly? i tried to fix the recording with all kind of programs that i could find in the web. All Video Fixer got furthest: after working quite some time it said that it can't fix the video. some other programs didn't even recognize that the file was a video file.

I'm sorry I can't help you on the crash—VLC can't automatically update though, only notify you when there's a new version available (and by choice download it and start the installer for you, but the setup is manual). You can always downgrade to an older version though, they're all archived on SourceForge.

As for repairing a video that didn't finish encoding, I had to do this recently because the camera application of my crappy Android phone sometimes crashes while recording a video. The only one I found was the "HD Video Repair Utility" by Grau GmbH that was already mentioned earlier in this thread. The bad news: the price of the software borders on what I would call a rip-off, more or less capitalising on people's fear of losing their files, rather than representing the work that actually goes into the development. The good news: the free trial repairs video up to 50% of their runtime, so at least you can check whether it would, in theory, be able to help you with your particular broken files. Note that the software requires (I think) a non-corrupt example video that was encoded the exactly same way, in order to restore some meta information.