Have you ever downloaded a video and gotten an error message that the file could not be played because it is damaged or corrupt? There are many reasons why a video file could become corrupt ranging from bad sectors on a hard drive to electromagnetic interference to power failures to torrent problems, etc.
Luckily, most damaged AVI or MPG files can be fixed because the problem is normally related to the index. If the index is repaired, then the files can be read by the media player again.
In this article, I’m going to talk about a couple of programs that can help you repair corrupt video files. Note that you might end up with a smaller file or with parts of the video missing when using these tools, so make sure to create a backup of the original file.
Also, if you end up using multiple tools, make sure to always start off with the original file for each program. Performing multiple repairs on the same video file using different programs could lead to more corruption!
It’s also worth noting that I specifically didn’t mention a couple of programs that you might run across online because of various issues. Digital Video Repair by Rising Research showed up as having malware when I ran it through VirusTotal.
Another program called File Repair that claims it can repair files of all sorts, but it didn’t repair my test AVI file and therefore wasn’t really worth mentioning for this article.
DivFix++
DivFix++ has been around for a long time and does a really good job of repairing AVI and DivX files. Once you download it, go ahead and extract all the files and then run the EXE file.
Click the Add Files button to choose your video file and then click on the Check Errors button to have the program scan to see if there are any issues.
In order to fix the file, go ahead and click on the Fix button. In my instance, it gave me an error count of 0, but the video was still not playable because I purposely messed up the index.
Even so, when I clicked the Fix button, it instantly repaired the file and created a copy because I checked the Keep Original File box. It will output the repaired video in the same directory as the original video file.
I could also tell before I even played the video that the file was repaired because Windows was showing me a thumbnail of the first frame rather than a generic video icon. Go ahead and give this program a shot first because it usually works.
VLC Media Player
If you already have VLC Media Player installed on your computer, then this might be the better option because it has the ability to repair the index for an AVI file.
When you open the damaged file, you’ll get a message asking what you would like to do: Build index then play, Play as is, or Do not play.
If you have a bunch of files that are having this problem, you can have VLC automatically fix the file when it is played by going to Tools and then Preferences. Click on Inputs and Codecs and then choose Always Fix next to Damaged or incomplete AVI file.
Now whenever you open a damaged AVI file, it will automatically fix it temporarily and play the video. Note that it does not actually modify the original video file itself, instead it just fixes the issue in memory and plays the file.
Remo Repair AVI
Remo Repair AVI is a free program to download, but will try to charge you a whopping $70 when you go to save your repaired video. This is just a ridiculous price and because of the way the program is currently coded, it can easily be bypassed.
Download the program, install it and then run it. Click the Browse button to select your video file and then click on the big Repair button.
Now don’t worry about clicking on Save or Preview because the program has already repaired the file and simply saved it to a hidden folder on the computer.
First, go ahead and open Explorer and configure it so that you can see hidden files and folders in Windows 8 or Windows 10. If you’re running Windows 7, click on Organize and then Folder and Search Options.
Next, click on the View tab and then click on the Show hidden files, folders and drives button.
Now navigate to the following folder on your hard drive:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Remo Repair AVI 2.0\$tp
Here you should see a file called $tp and it should be the same size or very close to your original video file. The file won’t have any extension so it’ll look like a default document.
Go ahead and copy this file to anywhere you like and then just rename it to anything you like, but make sure to put an .AVI extension to the end. For example, I copied mine to the desktop, right-clicked on it, chose Rename and then typed in MyVideo.avi. BAM! You can now play the repaired video just fine.
Hopefully, one of these three methods will get you a repaired and playable AVI video! If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!
Have a PDF document or an image that you would like to convert to text? Recently, someone sent me a document in the mail that I needed to edit and send back with corrections. The person couldn’t locate a digital copy, so I was tasked with getting all that text into digital format.
There was no way I was going to spend hours typing everything back in, so I ended up taking a nice high-quality picture of the document and then burned my way through a bunch of online OCR services to see which one would give me the best results.
In this article, I’ll go through a couple of my favorite sites for OCR that are free. It’s worth noting that most of these sites provide a basic free service and then have paid options if you want extra features like bigger images, multi-page PDF documents, different input languages, etc.
It’s also good to know beforehand that most of these services will not be able to match the formatting of your original document. These are mainly for extracting text and that’s it. If you need everything to be in a specific layout or format, you’ll have to manually do that once you get all the text from the OCR.
In addition, the best results for getting the text will come from documents with a 200 to 400 DPI resolution. If you have a low DPI image, the results will not be as good.
Lastly, there were a lot of sites I tested that just didn’t work. If you Google free online OCR, you’ll see a bunch of sites but several of the sites in the top 10 results didn’t even complete the conversion. Some would time out, other would give errors and some just got stuck on the “converting” page, so I didn’t even bother to mention those sites.
For each site, I tested two documents to see how well the output would be. For my tests, I simply used my iPhone 5S to take a picture of both documents and then uploaded them directly to the websites for conversion.
In case you want to see what the images looked like that I used for my test, I have attached them here: Test1 and Test2. Note that these are not the full resolution versions of the images taken from the phone. I used the full resolution image when uploading to the sites.
OnlineOCR
OnlineOCR.net is a clean and simple site that delivered very good results in my test. The main thing I like about it is that it doesn’t have tons of ads all over the place, which is usually the case with these kinds of niche service sites.
To start, select your file and wait till it finishes uploading. The max upload size for this site is 100 MB. If you register for a free account, you get a few extra features like the bigger upload size, multi-page PDFs, different input languages, more conversions per hour, etc.
Next, choose your input language and then choose the output format. You can choose from Word, Excel, or Plain Text. Click the Convert button and you’ll see the text displayed at the bottom in a box along with a download link.
If all you want is the text, just copy and paste it from the box. However, I suggest you download the Word document because it does a surprisingly great job of keeping the layout of the original document.
For example, when I opened the Word document for my second test, I was surprised to find that the document included a table with three columns, just like in the image.
Out of all the sites, this one was the best by far. It’s totally worth registering for if you need to do a lot of conversions.
For completeness, I am also going to link to the output files created by each service so you can see the results for yourself. Here are the results from OnlineOCR: Test1 Doc and Test2 Doc.
Note that when opening these Word documents on your computer, you’ll get a message in Word stating that it’s from the Internet and editing has been disabled. That is perfectly OK because Word doesn’t trust documents from the Internet and you really do not have to enable editing if you just want to view the document.
i2OCR
Another site that gave pretty good results was i2OCR. The process is very similar: choose your language, file, and then press Extract Text.
You’ll have to wait a minute or two here because this site takes a bit longer. Also, in Step 2, make sure that your image is showing right-side up in the preview, otherwise you’ll get a bunch of gibberish as output. For some reason, the images from my iPhone were showing in portrait mode on my computer, but landscape when I uploaded to this site.
I had to manually open the image in a photo editing app, rotate it 90 degrees, then rotate it back to portrait and then save it again. Once complete, scroll down and it’ll show you a preview of the text along with a download button.
This site fared pretty well with the output for the first test, but didn’t do so well with the second test that had the column layout. Here are the results from i2OCR: Test1 Doc and Test2 Doc.
FreeOCR
Free-OCR.com will take your images and convert them into plain text. It does not have an option to export to Word format. Choose your file, select a language and then click Start.
The site is fast and you’ll get the output fairly quickly. Just click on the link to download the text file to your computer.
As with NewOCR mentioned down below, this site capitalizes all the T’s in the document. I have no idea why it would do that, but for some odd reason this site and NewOCR both did this. It’s not a big deal to change it, but it’s a tedious process you really shouldn’t have to do.
In order to use FineReader Online, you have to register for an account, which gets you a 15-day free trial to OCR up to 10 pages for free. If you only need to do a one-time OCR for a couple of pages, then you can use this service. Make sure that you click the verify link in the confirmation email after you register.
Click on Recognize at the top and then click Upload to select your file. Choose your language, output format and then click Recognize at the bottom. This site has a clean interface and no ads too.
In my tests, this site was able to grab the text from the first test document, but it was absolutely enormous when I opened the Word doc, so I ended up doing it again and choosing Plain Text as the output format.
For the second test with the columns, the Word document was empty and I couldn’t even find the text. Not sure what happened there, but it doesn’t seem to be able to handle anything other than simple paragraphs. Here are the results from FineReader: Test1 Doc and Test2 Doc.
NewOCR
The next site, NewOCR.com, was OK, but not nearly as good as the first site. Firstly, it’s got ads, but thankfully not a ton. You first select your file and then click the Preview button.
You can then rotate the image and adjust the area where you want to scan for text. It’s pretty much kind of like how the scanning process works on a computer with an attached scanner.
If the document has multiple columns, you can check the Page layout analysis button and it will try to split the text up into columns. Click the OCR button, wait a few seconds for it to complete and then scroll down to the bottom when the page refreshes.
In the first test, it got all the text correctly, but for some reason capitalized every T in the document! No idea why it would do that, but it did. In the second test with page analysis enabled, it got most of the text, but the layout was completely off.
As you can see, free doesn’t really give you very good results most of the time unfortunately. The first site mentioned is the best by far because not only did it do a great job of recognizing all the text, it also managed to retain the format of the original document.
If you just need text, though, most of the websites above should be able to do that for you. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!
Dec 02, 2015 12:52 pm | Aseem Kishore | MS Office Tips
How to Open Multiple Instances of Excel
If you have ever worked with multiple workbooks in Excel, you know that it can sometimes cause issues if all of the workbooks are open in the same instance of Excel. For example, if you recalculate all formulas, it will do that for all open workbooks in the same instance.
If you don’t want that to happen or if you simply want to see both of your spreadsheets side by side in two different windows, then creating multiple instances of Excel makes sense. You can still split screen multiple spreadsheets within a single instance of Excel, but I find it cumbersome and not intuitive.
Versions of Excel
Before we get into details, you should determine which version of Excel you are using. If you have Office 2016 or Office 2013 installed, you don’t have to worry because whenever you open a new workbook, it automatically creates a new instance of Excel.
Only with Office 2010 and earlier do you have the single Excel instance issue. In this article, I’ll mention the different ways you can get Excel to open different workbooks in different instances.
Multiple Instances of Excel
Normally, you open Excel spreadsheets by either double-clicking on them in Explorer or by navigating to them from inside Excel. Using either of these two methods will result in the spreadsheets opening in a single instance of Excel.
Method 1 – Start Menu
The first way to get around this is to simply open the Start Menu and then click on the Excel shortcut. This will open a new instance of Excel automatically. Note that this will work in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.
If the Excel icon doesn’t show up in the list of most used apps, you can just go to All Programs or All Apps and open it from there.
Method 2 – Taskbar
If you already have one instance of Excel open and the Excel icon is on your Windows taskbar, you can just press and hold the SHIFT key and then click on the taskbar icon and it’ll open another instance.
Note that you don’t have actually have the Excel icon pinned to your taskbar. All you need to do is open one instance of Excel so that it shows up in the taskbar. Once there, you can hold down SHIFT and then click on the icon.
Method 3 – Middle Button
If you are using a mouse with a middle button or clickable scroll button, you can also just click that button to get a new instance without having to hold down any key. If you didn’t already know, the scroll button can also be clicked like a button on pretty much every mouse.
It’s also worth noting that you can simply right-click on the Excel icon in the taskbar too and then click on Excel 20xx and it’ll open a new instance.
Method 4 – Run Command
If Excel is missing from your desktop, Start Menu and taskbar, then you can still open a new instance of Excel by using the Run command. Just click on Start, type in Run and press Enter.
Now just type in the word excel into the run box and click OK.
Those are pretty much all the ways I could find for opening multiple instances of Excel. Now that you have your workbooks open in different instances of Excel, you can snap them to different parts of the screen.
Again, you don’t need to worry about any of this if you are using Office 2013 or Office 2016 because they no longer open multiple workbooks in a single instance of Excel. It might also be a good reason to upgrade to a newer version of Office if you’ve been holding out. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!
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