Photo booth videos are saving as corrupted/blank files.

Solutions that worked for me but I did not proceed because they required payment: https://fix.video/ or https://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery/video-repair.php.

Free solution that ended up successfully working for me: Untrunc. (See also this Reddit thread.)

I still think Apple should come out with an actual fix.

So I've been seeing this with some movies that I've recorded, and I opened them up to take a look at them.

Using Synalyze It! Pro I have found that the corrupt files look like this:

Note the 'qt ' atom and the 0 value for the 'wide' atom.

My good (usually much shorter) files look like this:

Note that they have an `mp42` atom instead.

Both of these are recorded using the same process (in my case recording an iOS simulator using simctl). I don't know why the format difference. I can repair the corrupt ones sometimes using external services.

Hi, I started experiencing the same issue. Tried every single thing in the book, still nothing. macOs Ventura. Any updates?

I am having the exact same problem. Since update to Monterey, any video (on built-in camera) longer than a couple of minutes is corrupted and won't play from the saved file in the Photo Booth folder. Looking at the number of folk making the same type of comment here, it seems to be widespread.

I am experiencing the same problem. I'm making an educated guess that the security features with screen lock are causing a write error. I have tried disabling the screen lock feature and it seems to work, but wanted to toss this hypothesis out there to see if anyone else who's having this issue can replicate this pattern.

Obviously the only way to fix this is to wait for a new patch because i don't want to have to disable this every time and I certainly don't want to leave my system unprotected. Hopefully this gives some of the developers some place to look.

This is really frustrating. Buying a new macbook pro created so many problems for me in almost every area of work. Apple continues to disappoint more and more... what a bummer.

Still no fix for photo booth? I am continuing to have this issue.

UPDATE--

I contacted Apple support both over chat and over phone (after a long conversation over chat they told me this issue could only be resolved over phone, but then the first person who called me back actually did not know the issue at all and said they needed to transfer me to a different department...such a mess!).

After the end, they told me there's no way they could retrieve the content of such a corrupted file, and the only way I could do is to not use Photo Booth, but use QuickTime Player to record videos. They also said the engineers were aware of this issue and they might have an update....But my important video is gone and there is no solution at all on that...

Give this a try: boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and test to see if the problem persists. Reboot normally and test again.

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 3 - 5 minutes as it's doing the following; 

• Verifies your startup disk and attempts to repair directory issues, if needed

• Loads only required kernel extensions (prevents 3rd party kernel/extensions from loading)

• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically

• Disables user-installed fonts 

• Deletes font caches, kernel cache, and other system cache files

PLEASE TELL ME SOMEONE FOUND A SOLUTION!!!

Where are the movies being saved? I found them in the Photo Booth Library in my Pictures folder. I had to Control (right) - click on the library and select Show Contents from the contextual menu. I copied a test movie that I made and it played with Quicktime Player.

Try using the free app VLC to play the movie file. If it works you can then covert it to the .m4v format with VLC.

Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

This is still a problem for me; I have a late 2016 MacBook Air running on Monterey 12.3.1 - I just updated it last night. I recorded a 2:30 test video and it just read 0:00 in the lower right, showed the corrupted screen that people have been posting when I tried to play it. I need to record a 20min video for school today, so I guess it's off to find plan B for that. Worked well last semester (in the fall).

For most video repair tools you will need another video recorded on the same microphone and camera, length of at least a minute seems recommended. Though there's no guarantee you will get the whole video back, it seems at the point of corruption most data is lost after that so I only recovered 25 mins of a 45 min video.

If you are comfortable with the command line, there is a free tool that I used to recover the video. Just make sure to provide the FF_VER=3.3.9 argument otherwise it did not work for me. This gave me the same result as any video repair site did without the price. The output video may appear to be choppy when played in QuickTime but in other players (like VLC) it was fine. Also the audio desynced at times on mine but that might just be bad luck.