Recover bad asx file?
 

Hi. I'm wondering if it's possible to fix a video file that I downloaded from a stream using MPlayer (using -dumpstream -dumpfile out.wmv mms://blah...). It did play once; in fact, I played it with xine while it was downloading. Now, I can't play it at all. MPlayer gives this error:

Playing out.wmv.
ASF file format detected.
No data chunk following header!
libavformat file format detected.
LAVF_header: av_open_input_stream() failed

As far as I know there is no DRM involved (I tried playing it on a windows pc in WMP10 and it wouldn't even recognize the format.) Why will this not play now, when it did before? (I hope I don't have 561 MB of crap sitting on my desktop.)

I have another file from the same stream that works, and I'm wondering is it possible to copy the header from the good file onto the bad one somehow? Any thoughts? Thanks..

I doubt it, since ASF is a media container just like AVI and the header is built specifically for and describing that stream. You could try to demux the stream and rebuild it. I don't know if GNU/Linux can handle that with the win32codecs, could try ClippyOS, AVS with Virtualdubmod. Else if you could open the .asx file (it's just text) you could try downloading the stream directly?

Thanks for your reply. I tried Virtualdubmod (had to use a Windows PC for that) and it too complained about a missing chunk after the header. Whatever is missing won't let me demux using ffmpeg or similar. I tried opening the file in emacs and copied/pasted headers. ffmpeg was then able to tell that it is a wmv file but it couldn't detect the sample rate. Not much of the file is human-readable so it's probably a lost cause. Fortunately the TV station posted this program on their site, so I just downloaded it from there, albeit it's of much less quality than the original stream.