I recovered many thousands of .mov video files on my mac from a corrupted time machine backup using EaseUS recovery wizard. However, many of the files are corrupted. If you try to open them Quicktime will say it cannot open the document. How can I write a program to check many thousands of these files and delete the corrupted ones? I haven't been able to set up an account for chatgpt to ask it to do it :)
iMac 27″, macOS 11.7
They may not be recoverable as regular playable movies as that recovery software may not have recovered all of the parts of the movie or organized them in a manner that QuickTime determines as playable. It gives you the illusion it has recovered something but probably does not guarantee the accuracy of that recovery.
Have you attempted to play these corrupted .mov files in the free VLC media player?
There are no programmatical means to determine if a movie is corrupt or not. If it doesn't play, it is corrupt.
FWIW, I agree with VikingOSX 100%. There is no way to detect the corrupt files without trying to play each one.
Thanks for your responses. The fact remains that some video files were playable in their entirety (by Quicktime). I just want to weed out the ones that Quicktime says are NOT playable as I mentioned. Would it be possible to run Automator or another tool to see if Quicktime displays the error message shown below and, if yes, then delete the file and go onto the next file? Note that other .mov videos were played by Quicktime.
This question might best be answered in Apple's Developers Community.
https://developers.apple.com/forums/
How to programmatically check for corrupted .mov and delete it
