Hello, I'm trying to undelete mpeg files with photorec. It seems to be able retrieve something however most of the files are partly unplayable and mplayer often crashes when trying to rewind through them.

I'm looking for a tool that could pull out as much useful data from these files as possible and use that to build a playable video.

Any suggestions? Atm, I'm using vcdgear but it seems to remove more working frames than it produces.

It doesn't really matter if the video has dead pixels or it doesn't show at all (just sound) as long as the video is can be played by some player.

Edit: the main reason why I wanna do this that I want to speed up the process that it takes to go through all the video's ( I have more than 20 hours of video. It is just stucky to go through broken mpeg file with mplayer.

That sounds pretty familiar to me as I went through the same misery trying to cure my mangled video files. All in all, the results weren't so bad (photorec properly recovered about 90% of them) but as for the corrupted ones, I gave up in the end.
You could try some of the video editors around but repairs will be time-consuming, not to mention the time spent getting familiarized with these tools. And that is providing that they are able to make any more sense from the fragments than media players can.
I also recommend using vlc instead of mplayer as it tends to be more stable when it's fed corrupted media; in fact, in some cases, it may be able to perform some repairs on its own. I wasn't familiar with that capability until yesterday, when it suddenly told me that one of my avi files was damaged and that it could try repairing it. It worked, too, but I don't know about files that were completely ripped to pieces.

Hmm, I have also tried VLC but it seems like most of the time it doesn't show anything unlike mplayer can show some video.

I found out that putting mpeg file through ffmpeg would make it more playable. However it does lose some frames.

ffmpeg -i file.mpeg file.correct.mpeg