This browser cannot run the repair
The whole repair happens on this page, which asks the browser for two things: reading a file from your disk as bytes, and loading JavaScript modules. Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari have done both since 2018. There is no version of this that sends your video somewhere else to be repaired instead.
Drop a video that will not play
argano walks the raw bytes of a recording that was cut short, finds the frames, rebuilds the index and writes a copy that plays. The picture and the sound are carried across as they are, so nothing is encoded again and the file you drop is only ever read.
MP4, MOV and M4V, from a phone, a camera, a drone or a screen recorder.
What this is
A recorder writes the picture and the sound as it goes and saves the index for last. Pull the battery, fill the card, crash the app, and the recording is all there with nothing to describe it, which is why every player refuses to open it. argano reads the media, works out where each frame starts and how long it lasts, writes a fresh index and gives back a copy that plays.
The reference video is for the settings that were never written down: the shape of the picture and how it was encoded. Any clip that still plays from the same camera or app carries them, and argano copies nothing else out of it.
What it cannot do
- It cannot bring back media that was never written. If the recorder stopped before the bytes reached the disk, they are not in the file, and no tool can find what is not there.
- It does not encode anything again. Frames that were recorded badly come back exactly as badly as they were recorded.
- It reads H.264 and H.265 video with AAC sound. Anything else is named on the diagnosis screen and goes no further.
- It reads MP4 and MOV files, M4V included. Not MKV, not AVI, not a camera's own raw format.
argano is free and the code is open: github.com/nerln/argano. There is a command line version there too, for repairing a folder at a time.
Diagnosis
What is inside the file
| Box | Starts at | Size | Share |
|---|
Repairing
- Read the file
- Find the frames
- Split the sound into frames
- Put the frames back on a clock
- Write the repaired copy
- Check the result
The percentage is an estimate of the whole job, since some stages are easier to measure than others. An hour of 4K takes a few minutes to walk through. The work happens on this page, so the window sits still for seconds at a time while a stage runs: that is the repair, not a crash. Leave the tab open until it finishes, and keep your file where it is, because it is being read from disk as this goes.
Your own file has not been touched. argano read it and wrote something new, and the copy above is held in this tab until you save it or leave.