What to do when the recovered MP4 video from the memory card not playing on Mac?

I accidentally erased a Canon camera's SDHC memory card before downloading the MP4 formatted videos I wanted. I immediately removed the card from the camera and then was successfully recovering the video files with 3 different apps: EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, Wondershare Data Recovery, and Tenorshare Photo Recovery. But in all 3 cases, the rescued video files show up as black and silent while being played back with QuickTime or a third-party player on my MacBook Pro running 10.6.8. I'm sure the videos were recorded successfully, because earlier I had viewed them and played them back on the camera. Now that I've recovered the files, how can I repair them or reformat them in some way to make them viewable or is there anyway to fully recover the videos and make them play normally on Mac?

Best Answered by

Anna Yuan

Answered on Monday, April 29, 2024

I know you've tried the below data recovery apps ( Tenorshare Photo Recovery for Mac, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, and Wondershare Data Recovery ) on your Mac to recover your MP4 videos but your problem still exists when playing them on MacBook so I won't recommend the above apps again. However, using the data recovery software may be the only chance to get your MP4 files back, so you can proceed with other Mac data recovery tools.

Here, I'd like to recommend iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to you for two reasons. One is that it can recover videos from an erased storage device with different file formats, including MP4, M4V, MKV, MOV, MPEG, WMV, AVI, FLA, FLV, AMV, and so on. Another reason is that this powerful data recovery app provides the 'PREVIEW' function to see if your MP4 video can be played after finishing recovery. I believe this function is what you're desperately looking for.

Now, let's see what to do to recover your important MP4 videos and make them play normally.

First, free download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac and launch this SDHC card recovery for Mac app.

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iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

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Next, click on Storage Device from the sidebar. From the storage device list, choose the erased Canon camera's SDHC memory card.

And click Search for Lost Data to scan all erased files on it. When the lost data was found, you can filter files by different categories. According to your situation, you can choose the video category.

Next comes the most important step. Select the MP4 formatted video you want, and click the button named 'Preview' under it. The 'Preview' function will automatically use the macOS default video player to play it. No matter whether you're using Quick Time Player or any other third-party player that supports MP4 file format on your Mac, your video files should be viewable here. Then click the 'Recover' button to recover the videos and store them on your Mac just in case data was overwritten on the SDHC memory card.

Note: If your videos can't be previewed in iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software, you should also recover them first on your Mac.

Now check if the recovered MP4-formatted videos can be played in macOS Quick Time Player or other third-party players. Hope it works this time. If still not, maybe there's something wrong with your memory card, such as corrupted or misformatted. You should fix the corrupted SD card first and then recover videos from it.

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