OBS File Corrupted After Crash - Recovery Guide

OBS File Corrupted After Crash: Recovery Guide

Most guides to this problem send you straight to a repair tool. That is the wrong first move, because roughly half the files people try to repair either never contained any video data or were never actually broken.

Repair tools are slow, they need a matching reference file, and running one on a file that has no recoverable data wastes an hour and tells you nothing. So this guide works in the other order. You will establish whether your footage is physically on the disk, read what the file actually says about itself, and only then pick a repair path.

Everything here is diagnosis and evidence. Once you know what you are holding, the OBS Crashed and Recording Corrupted repair bench covers the FFmpeg and Untrunc mechanics in detail, and there is no point duplicating them here.

Two Rules Before You Touch Anything

Do not record anything else to that drive yet. If the file turns out to be missing rather than damaged, its data is still sitting in unallocated space, and every new write reduces the chance of getting it back. Finish the diagnosis before you start a fresh take.

Work on a copy. Duplicate the damaged file to another folder and run every tool against the duplicate. Some repair utilities write in place, and a failed repair on your only copy ends the conversation.

If you cannot find the file at all, OBS records the exact path it wrote to in its log. OBS Can't Find Recording: Where Are OBS Files Saved walks through pulling that path out of the log rather than guessing at folders.

Step 1: Is the Data Physically There?

This single check decides everything that follows, and it takes fifteen seconds.

Right-click the file and look at its size on disk. Then work out what the size should be. OBS writes at a near-constant rate, so the arithmetic is simple:

Expected size in megabytes = total bitrate in Mbps × seconds recorded ÷ 8

If you recorded at 8000 Kbps, that is 8 Mbps, which is almost exactly 1 MB per second. A recording that ran for ten minutes before the crash should be somewhere near 600 MB.

Now compare:

A 0 KB file is genuinely dead, and knowing that immediately is worth more than an afternoon of hopeful repair attempts. A correctly sized file that will not play is the good outcome, because it means every frame is on your disk and only the map to those frames is missing.

Step 2: Ask the File What Is Wrong With It

Windows Media Player and QuickTime both report the same useless message for a dozen different faults. FFprobe, which installs alongside FFmpeg, tells you precisely which one you have.

ffprobe -v error -show_format -show_streams "broken.mp4"

Match the response:

That fourth row catches more people than anyone expects. A perfectly healthy HEVC recording will refuse to open in Windows Media Player and produce an error that reads exactly like corruption. Before you repair anything, drag the file into VLC. If it plays, there was never a problem with the file.

Step 3: Route to the Right Repair

Once FFprobe has named the fault, the repair path is decided. Each of these is covered properly elsewhere, so treat this as a router.

Correct size, missing index, MKV or TS source. Try OBS itself first. File > Remux Recordings, point it at the damaged file, and click Remux. MKV writes its data in self-contained clusters, so a truncated MKV frequently rewraps cleanly with no tooling at all. The full procedure is in How to Convert OBS MKV to MP4.

Correct size, moov atom not found, MP4 or MOV source. This needs an index rebuilt from a reference file recorded with identical settings, which is what Untrunc does. The step-by-step is in OBS Crashed and Recording Corrupted: Can You Recover It?.

Partially written file. FFmpeg can usually salvage the intact leading portion and discard the damaged tail. Expect to lose the final few seconds.

Plays, but shows green blocks or smearing. This is not file corruption and no repair tool will touch it. Those frames left the encoder already broken, which points at OBS Encoding Overloaded Error: How to Fix instead.

Step 4: When the File Is Missing, Not Broken

If the folder is empty, you are not dealing with corruption and repair tools are irrelevant. Three places are worth checking before you accept the loss.

Check for a leftover temporary file. Some OBS configurations write to a temporary name and rename on stop. Show hidden files and sort the recording folder by date modified. A file with an odd extension and the right timestamp is your recording, and renaming it back to .mkv or .mp4 is often all it needs.

Check the replay buffer path. If the replay buffer was active, it writes to its own separately configured output directory in Settings > Output, which is very often not the folder you have been looking in.

Check your operating system's snapshots. On Windows, right-click the containing folder, choose Properties > Previous Versions, and look for a restore point from before the crash. On macOS, open the folder in Finder and enter Time Machine. Local snapshots are taken hourly on an internal drive even when no backup disk is attached, so this works far more often than people assume.

What Is Actually Recoverable

Making the Failure Mode Impossible

The reason a crash destroys an MP4 is that MP4 stores its index at the end of the file, and a crash means the end never arrives. MKV, fragmented MP4, and hybrid MP4 all write recoverable structures continuously, so an interrupted recording stays playable up to the moment it stopped.

Switching that one setting removes this entire category of problem permanently. The comparison and the exact configuration are in OBS MKV vs MP4: Which Should You Use?.

And if OBS is crashing often enough that you have landed here, the container is treating a symptom. OBS Keeps Crashing: How to Fix It deals with the cause.

A Recorder Where This Cannot Happen

You should not need to know what a moov atom is to publish a tutorial. That knowledge is only necessary because OBS is a broadcast tool, and broadcast tools hand you the failure modes along with the control.

Cubix Capture writes recoverable output continuously rather than finalising an index at the end, so an interrupted session leaves a playable file rather than a forensics project. It runs on Windows and Mac, with a free Starter plan and no account required.

Keep Reading

• OBS Crashed and Recording Corrupted: Can You Recover It? is the repair bench, with the full FFmpeg and Untrunc procedures.
• OBS Crashed Mid Recording: Is the File Recoverable? covers the first five minutes after a crash.
• OBS Can't Find Recording: Where Are OBS Files Saved for pulling the real output path out of the OBS log.
• OBS Recording Saves as MKV: How to Change to MP4 to set up the crash-safe configuration.