Corrupt video file. Help please!

[lottie93]

A very important video on my phone, which was fine a few days ago, has stopped working. I get "Failed to play video An unknown error has occurred." whenever I try to play. It's not showing up in my gallery but still showing up in my files. The file information says the size is still 1.19GB and that it's stored in /storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera, but I don't know what that means except it doesn't look good. It no longer has a thumbnail and has failed to play on windows media player and quicktime when copied over to my laptop. I can't download VLC on here, but I feel like I'd get the same error message about file format/codec or whatever. I didn't mess with the video on my phone, so why is it suddenly corrupted? And the only one?! It was such a special memory and I'm so upset that this has happened. I'm wondering if it's a problem with the SD card in my phone (Samsung Galaxy S6). My phone has been getting really hot while charging recently, and I've noticed that when I plug the phone in, the only drive that shows up is "Phone" when I'm pretty sure I used to get both "Phone" and "SD card/storage"? Is there any way to fix this? There's nothing I can really do with an S6 myself though.. please help!

 

[El Presidente]

Can you transfer the file to a PC? Does it play on there?

 

[lottie93]

Can you transfer the file to a PC? Does it play on there?

I have transferred it and the file size is still the same, but no, it doesn't play.

 

[El Presidente]

Do you know if you ever setup Google Photos? It may be backed up to the cloud? If you log in here with your Google account info, can you see it: https://photos.google.com/

 

[Hadron]

The S6 doesn't have a sd card. Like all Androids it has an area of internal storage that behaves like one. /storage/emulated/0 is the address of this emulated sd card within the phone storage, so that is all normal. This can normally be addressed as "/sdcard", but it's the same location, just different ways of referring to it. "DCIM/Camera" is the default location within this for photos on most devices.

Phone getting really hot while charging is not normal. I would recommend backing up everything else of importance that's on it. Actually I'd recommend that regardless: if your only copy is on the phone what happens if the phone breaks or is lost or stolen?

As for what's wrong, it's very hard to say from here. You might be unlucky and have developed a storage error that the storage controller didn't detect and correct, or there might have been a software bug and something overwrote a bit of the file, or something else may have happened. It's probably impossible to know.

There is an app in the Play Store that is supposed to fix corrupted videos, but it will presumably only be able to fix specific types of corruption so no guarantees. The app is here, and the author describes it in this xda thread. I've never used it (only just discovered its existence) and make absolutely no promises whatsoever that it will work for you, just posting the info in case it is helpful.