My video camera Created a DRM protected file?

[Tiny]

I have a drone (hexacopter) that uses an iLook+ HD video camera.


When it is set to record, you have to toggle a switch to save the video when finished.
If you forget to toggle the video switch before powering off the aircraft, then the video is still saved to the MicroSD card as a .MOV file, however it wont playback, convert or be accepted in a video editor; as it is identified as an unsupported content format or a protected file.
EDit; Normally when saved properly, the file is a .MOV with H.264 encoding, 1080P 30FPS.

FreeStudio video file converter, said it is a DRM protected file.
I've also tried with VLC, WMP, Quicktime & a professional Video editing program (Cyberlink Powerdirector).

There is probably some expensive software that can do it, however it would be nice if I didn't have to pay to recover my own video footage.

So does anyone know how to remove DRM from a self created .MOV file for free?

There is so many free programs that are full of crap, I'd just like to find one that does the job.

[gordon_s1942]

I'm as thick as two bricks with anything relating to these sorts of things and I have only briefly played with the 2 In car cams I have.
One is a 'no name' and the other is a Uniden Igo 850 cam.
Excluding the transmitter, drone and R/C, this is no different to InCar recording.
Both allow the recording time to be set in 'blocks' of up to 5 minutes and both allow them to either stop when the SD card is full or 'Overwrite'.
I did find that when I downloaded the recorded files, both seem only to want to play one file at a time unless you fiddle around or use their software to run it as a continuous clip.
In my ignorance I would have thought that the .MOV files were a pretty bog simple play anything sort of format but it seems thats not the case.
It would fantastic to play around with this sort of thing (both to fly and record) but I am going to sit back and 'Look and Learn' before I ever consider it as a hobby.

I am sure Tiny wont be the only one to run into this and other problems as it seems more are taking this up and there are more choices to make regarding what equipment to buy.

[ssrattus]

I would suspect it isn't actually DRM protected, more likely that the video file wasn't correctly finalised and needs to be repaired. I haven't found any free solutions though. will fix 50% of the file using the free version. If it works then you know the problem.

[jok11n]

Can you provide a small sample of the recordings, with and without the correct save technique? About a minute of each should be enough, if you can make a couple of test files and upload them somewhere, mega, Dropbox etc to have a look at

[Tiny]

I would suspect it isn't actually DRM protected, more likely that the video file wasn't correctly finalised and needs to be repaired. I haven't found any free solutions though. will fix 50% of the file using the free version. If it works then you know the problem.

I've been leaning in that direction since I posted & tried a few more things.
I reckon as the file is not finalised I just got the DRM error message as a substitute of what the real problem of reading the file was.
I came across some info on getting inside the container file (MOV) with a hex editor & repairing the missing lines of code with a copy/paste from a working file.
Could be fun.

Can you provide a small sample of the recordings, with and without the correct save technique? About a minute of each should be enough, if you can make a couple of test files and upload them somewhere, mega, Dropbox etc to have a look at

Thanks for the offer jok11n, at the moment I'll try the above with the hex editor as the file I have that I would like to repair is 1.3GB.
I could of course just create new short files from the camera for comparison info. One finalised & one not. Looking at approx 100MB per minute of footage.


The only thing I would think is different between a large file & a small file in hex code is the amount of video & time code data. The finalising & codec info should be quite small as it only takes a second or so to write the info when you toggle the switch.
It's pissing rain here today, so I'll work with copies of files I have & see what happens.
Let you know if I have any joy.

EDIT; Here is the info I got onto just for your interest,

To restore a damaged movie, you could copy the "header" from a movie compressed the exact same way, to the damaged file and get a repaired movie. This require a lot of guesswork, as there has always been many options for saving QuickTime movies, and guessing the right combination require that you have a good idea of how the movie was saved originally.

[gordon_s1942]

To get one group of clips to run together was use a program that let me 'stitch' them together.
One time I made a mistake and 'converted' the clips first to a different format that took ages before stitching them into a single clip.

[DB44]

One more thing worth a try is to run the file through a conversion program. Format Factory is free, or even something like Aimersoft DRM media converter if you have it. I have had some success in the past with Format Factory in repairing a corrupt file.

[jok11n]

I could of course just create new short files from the camera for comparison info. One finalised & one not. Looking at approx 100MB per minute of footage.

that's what I meant, I have some software that can repair broken files, it needs a working file to compare the structure then it rebuilds the broken file, I could test it with your files and see if suitable, we use it with MOV and MP4 H.264 files from the car cameras, may be suitable, not sure but will willing to test for you if you want to provide some samples

[Tiny]

One more thing worth a try is to run the file through a conversion program. Format Factory is free, or even something like Aimersoft DRM media converter if you have it. I have had some success in the past with Format Factory in repairing a corrupt file.

Thanks for that, will try Format Factory, however I suspect it will have the same problem as others I've tried to read & convert the file with, as the file is not finalised, the handling & codec info are missing.

that's what I meant, I have some software that can repair broken files, it needs a working file to compare the structure then it rebuilds the broken file, I could test it with your files and see if suitable, we use it with MOV and MP4 H.264 files from the car cameras, may be suitable, not sure but will willing to test for you if you want to provide some samples

Thanks again mate, you're a champion, I would love to have software like that, but not really worth it for this video at the moment.
I could rerun the drone on a similar day & rerecord the footage if necessary. It won't be the same but close.

This is more of an excercise in fixing it to find out if it's possible for the future when I make the same dumb mistake & have valuable footage I can't replace.

I am nearly there with the hex editor. I've found the missing data by comparing files & found that the last ~50MB of data on similar finalised files is similar (not exactly the same), however it's nowhere to be seen on the unfinalised file.
It contains words such as; handling, video, sound, etc,.
I'm going to have to copy paste this in segments as the Hex editor I have only will copy <10MB to the clipboard at a time.
This is good & bad, as Hex code is in bytes or lines of bytes, so that's a lot of lines of data to string together in my head so I'm building a reference key, for each start & end point of the blocks of data I will copy & paste to the unfinalised file.

Wish me luck.

Lucky the text editor I have has a search function (once I worked out how to use it properly), a compare function & also able to open multiple videos in tabs.
If anyone would like to see what makes up a video file, (billions of bytes), open it in,
Freeware & works in most OS including Linux.

[jok11n]

Well the offer is there if you want me to try, if it works on your sample then it should be able to rebuild your file you're trying to fix, there's no cost involved other than a bit of time