Recovering videos from an SD card

[Zero102]

I am trying to recover a video file from my dashcam's SD card. I check it every couple weeks and I've never had an issue with this card until now (roughly 1 year of use). When I put the card in my phone it says there is only ~50MB used on the card and it shows almost nothing on it. In my wife's phone it also shows almost nothing on the card but it says that ~31/32GB is used. I stuck it in my computer and used photorec to pull off what it could, and it found a bunch of video files but they all have the wrong extension (although about the right file size, they should all be ~160MB and most files are 160-163MB) and won't play in any media player I've tried (media player classic, VLC, windows media player).

Does anybody know other good (free) recovery software that may work, or any way I can open these corrupted video files to figure out which one may have what I'm looking for?

I came within inches of hitting a deer today and wanted to review the video to see if I missed a deer standing on the side of the road or if it really did just sprint across the road without me having a chance to see it coming. Obviously this isn't worth any money to me to get back so I'm mainly just doing a best effort thing with free software. I would offer up the video files in question but there are ~30GB of video files and I don't know if the one I want even recorded properly.

[roll_over]

pandora recovery maybe

[Zero102]

After checking the card again there is a LOST.DIR directory - looks like one of the phones we tried to read the card with tried to be smart and ran fsck on the card. I'm trying to check every one of these files by hand right now but it'll take a long time.

Any other suggestions of very tolerant movie players that will play a file that is missing bits would be handy :)

[Zero102]

Apparently I'm too quick to post about this stuff - managed to dig it out of the LOST.DIR directory (after manually checking about 250 video files). I'll post it up in the dashcam thread once I get a chance to edit the audio out and cut it down a bit. I wanted the video because I remembered the deer as sprinting right out of the ditch and across the road without stopping (in moderate traffic I might add) but I wanted to make sure that there was nothing further I could have done.

For anybody else in this situation I was able to just dig through the LOST.DIR directory and rename all the bigger files to have .mp4 on the end, then VLC played them just fine. I got lucky I guess.

I'll be doing a sector-by-sector check of this card and checking if maybe the internal battery in the camera is going bad before putting this card back into the camera.

[revelations]

I would recommend the following with these cards (I run 3 dash cams in 3 vehicles):

a) buy the best cards from mem ex (class 10, etc)
b) format periodically
c) rotate with a spare