How to Fix Broken AVI Files with DivFix++

We’ve all had it happen. You download a (perfectly legitimate) AVI file and go to play it, only to find that it’s got a corrupted index, or bad frames, or other such flaws. Ideally, you can find a repair utility that can actually fix the files instead of all the hassle of re-downloading or re-encoding to a different format. One such utility is DivFix++. It’s free (speech and beer), multiplatform, can process multiple files at once, and most importantly, it works.

The download page can be found here. You’ll find packages for Linux (RPM and DEB), Mac OSX, and Windows.

Windows users will get a ZIP file that does not require an install. Simply extract the ZIP file normally and run DivFix++.exe from the extracted folder.

One of my favorite things about DivFix++ is that it can take a whole list of files instead of just one, and it will go through each item in that list. Click Add Files to include whichever files you’re having trouble with.

Before beginning the fix, there’s a few more things you might like to know. Instead of doing in-place repairs on the original file, DivFix++ will read your broken file and save the fixed version to a new filename. By default, it will save the new files in the same location as the old ones. If you’d like to change that, uncheck the Relative Output Folder and File button in the top left, and click the folder icon to browse for a new location for the fixed files.

You may want to scan the file for errors prior to running the fix. If so, you can click Check Errors at the bottom and the results of each check will appear in the log window to the right.

Note that some types of video flaws will not be included in the error count in the log. I’ve had a batch of files with bad indexes that had an error count of 0, but were still fixed by DivFix++ in the output file.

If you’re confident you’ve got all the files ready and output location is set to where you want it, hit Fix and watch the progress. The process goes fairly quickly. The seven files in the screenshots are all approximately 15 minutes long, and DivFix++ repaired all seven in under a minute on Windows XP with a Core 2 Duo.

Once finished, open your file browser to the location you set for your output files (or the original file location if you kept it at defaults) and you’ll find the fixed files.

This demonstrates my only major complaint about DivFix++, the fact that it renames each of the output files. I don’t particularly want all my video files to start with DivFix++, and I’d rather not have to rename all of them manually to remove it. There are other batch renaming utilities out there, but an option in the DivFix++ preferences could resolve the problem completely. Other than that, I’ve had great luck with DivFix++ and it has managed to repair all but the most mangled of the AVI files I’ve thrown at it.

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