Recently my NAS took some physical damage and the HDDs are not too happy about it. Most of my video files are partially corrupted. Meaning, they report some errors when checked with ffmpeg[1], and when you watch them they’ll sometimes freeze or skip a few seconds, but they’re not so corrupt they won’t play. So, the vast majority of the file is fine. I’d prefer to avoid re-downloading all of my media when such a small fraction of the total file is damaged.

Is there any way to only download chunks of the file that have errors?

In the mean time, I can repack and ignore errors[2] so that the freezing/pausing stops during playback, but it’ll still skip parts or otherwise act up.


  1. ffmpeg -v error -i $vidfile -map 0:1 -f null - ↩︎

  2. ffmpeg -i $vidfile -c copy $newvidfile ↩︎