The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/CyberpunkLover on 2024-06-09 23:52:06.
I've been collecting music video clips for about 15 years now, and collected something like 85k clips.
I've been putting everything on hard drives, then after filling them up, moving everything to larger drive.
The last drive I've used was some Western Digital Blue 8TB drive, and last week it filled up, so I purchased a new 20TB drive and was about to copy everything into it, but before I could do that, the WD drive failed.
I've used few file restoration programs, and managed to salvage about 80% of everything that was on the drive, but the problem is, like 70% of what I've restored is either corrupted, or doesn't have audio. And all the files were put into ~75 different folders, with around 900 or so files each.
I'd like to sort out the files with audio and without, in order to save the good ones and get rid of the bad ones.
All files were renamed to random letters and numbers by recovery software, so the corrupted and muted files are basically completely useless to me, since I can't even use the file names to find out what files those are.
All the files are either .mp4, .mkv, .avi, .mov or .wmv.
Sorting through tens of thousands of files would take me months, and I just don't have the time or patience to do that. I've had the idea of importing files into video editing soft like Premiere and look at the generated waveform to find out good files, but there's quite a lot of files with codecs unsupported by Premiere, like VP09 and such, so vast majority of files, even with audio present show up as flat lines on Premiere waveform, thus this method is completely useless to me. Like, importing a folder of restored files only generates maybe 20-30 waveforms, the rest are flat lines, and so manual sorting is still required.
Anyone know of any software that can scan thousands of files and either mark or separate them by presence of audio, or have some other solution?