I responded to a call today about a DVD that a friend had burned in Germany with some home video footage. The DVD was supposedly made with Windows Movie Maker, but now was refusing to play in anything, be it computer or DVD player.
I put the DVD in the laptop, and lo and behold Windows identified it as a blank DVD. Obviously it wasn’t, a visual check confirmed from the difference in colour that there was data burned to the disk. In addition, Nero could tell there was one unclosed session of about 90Mb, but couldn’t do anything with it, including close it. It didn’t help that the person didn’t have the full version of Nero, her Nero was an OEM copy of Nero Express that didn’t have “import session” options.
Eventually using a combination of different products, I managed to dump the contents of that session to a folder on the hard drive, and ended up with two files. An index file, less than 4k in size, and a file called 1.c00 that was the remainder of the 89Mb.
A quick scan for c00 files (that’s letter c, zero, zero) revealed that the most likely format for this file was a compressed folder. So I downloaded WinRAR and tried to get it to open the file.
Lo and behold, the file contained a .WMV video – the footage concerned. Using Nero I then reburned the file as DVD video, creating a working DVD.
This doesn’t answer two important questions though:
- How did the video file end up compressed?
- How did it end up authored into an unclosed DVD session, assuming that the burning program was indeed Windows Movie Maker – it simply doesn’t have those options!
I still don’t know at the end of the day how the DVD ended up in that state, and the original is still in that state, unreadable by everything. But at the end of the day at least we did end up with a working DVD of the footage – and in the end, I guess that’s all that matters.