NDR / Claims, court and footage / Exports, containers, viewers

Video exhibits · getting the file open in the first place

CCTV file will not open, Nottingham. The disc arrived; not one thing you own will open it.

£400 + VAT, and back comes a copy that opens on anything, next to your export in the state it reached us. The reason you are stuck is that CCTV is not ordinary video. A recorder builds its own wrapper round every picture, files the lot by channel and by time, then hands you a viewer it wrote itself. Those viewers want Windows; one or two speak only to the model that produced the disc; on a Mac they do nothing whatever — and that is where a disc ends up in a drawer somewhere in Nottingham while a matter goes quiet for a fortnight. The remedy is unglamorous. Read the container out of the structure of the file, shift the stream into something ordinary, leave your original alone, hash both, and set down each step so another examiner can follow it. It does not make the picture any better. Where the system is not yours, we need the owner's say-so first.

On most jobs, nothing to pay if no files come back Treated as an exhibit from the moment it lands Every hour, the loop writes over more of it

An engineer will talk it through, in confidence
0115 8220606

Why no player will open it.

Not video as your computer knows itA recorder does not produce files your computer has met before. The picture goes inside the maker's own wrapper, the stream markers answer to a private scheme, and frames are stored in the order they happened rather than by stream. A general player handed that will assemble them wrongly.

The file the recorder wroteInside it sit the timestamps the box wrote, with the channel details next to them. Re-encode and both of those disappear, along with a little quality.

The viewer supplied on the discNormally a Windows executable, sitting on the disc beside the video. It will not run on a Mac, a couple work with their own recorder and nothing else, and in plenty of cases nobody supplied a viewer at all. That is the moment the disc goes into a drawer.

What this bench does with itThe container gets read out of the file, the stream moved without re-encoding, your original left alone, both hashed, and each step written down so anybody else could repeat the conversion. £400 + VAT. Where nothing is recovered, most jobs carry no charge.

The format, then the player, then the clock.

Something else? Say what it does →

What you are looking at	What usually causes it	What that means for you
An extension of .dav or .264	Video inside a proprietary wrapper the maker never documented	Send the player along with it
A disc that came with no player on it	Common enough. The container then gets read out of the file's own structure	Post the entire folder over
An .exe that runs on Windows only	Useless on a Mac, and frequently useless on a newer PC too	Ask us for a converted version
Someone's phone pointed at a monitor	Filmed off a monitor and re-encoded, it is no longer the exhibit	Go back and ask for the export itself
The recorder's own clock	They wander, they get entered wrongly on fitting day, and nobody adjusts them	Measured against a reference and reported as a number, never assumed

Getting it here: tracked, insured post to the intake lab, and the return leg is at our cost. Unsure what belongs in the box? Ring before it is taped up, and an engineer will run through what to include and what to keep at home. The rest of it is set out on the packing and postage guide.

The order we work in.

More jobs like this one →

Booked in the day it arrives, and the first look is on us Free

Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.

The first look is freeOne fixed figure, in writingNo charge at this point

Establish what the file actually is

An extension tells you almost nothing — .dav, .264, .dat, .vid, sometimes an .mp4 whose insides have been rearranged. Only the structure within settles it. Where an export has been encrypted, the password file belonging with it has to travel too, and short of that nothing opens at all.

The format read out of the fileThe extension tells you next to nothing

A copy that opens anywhere

There is no re-encoding. The stream shifts into a standard container precisely as it stands, nothing added and nothing thrown away, and the file your recorder produced stays here to travel home beside the copy.

Stream copied, never re-encodedYour original stays as it is

The clock difference is measured

The recorder's clock is compared with a reference and the difference noted. Most of it is usually the seasonal hour. Whatever that difference comes to is reported as a number, which spares everybody an argument at a tribunal.

Compared with a reference clockWritten down as a number, not guessed

The file list comes before the bill

The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.

Nothing is charged until you agree the figureNew media, bought in for your jobWe pay to send it home

What turns up on recorder disks

The fault lies with the player, not with the file — undocumented wrappers hold the H.264 or H.265 stream, the markers inside them follow the maker's own invention, and the ordering runs by time instead of by stream. A general decoder pointed at that pairs frames with the wrong neighbours and then builds on its own mistake.
The manufacturer's viewer is no answer either — it can alter what you are shown and not mention it, and the moment it reads past the disk index the pictures come out carrying no date or time at all.
Re-exporting gives you a new file, not the old one — an AVI built out of an H.264 original shed frames at the hour boundary, and its metadata went on agreeing with itself regardless. Widescreen is what non-square pixels turn into on screen, and every proportion in the frame moves with them.
Redaction is a separate job, and deliberately a small one — where somebody with no part in the matter has to be obscured before a clip leaves, a short export gets the faces and the number plates blurred, then goes out under an exhibit number of its own — never as the master copy. Hour upon hour of multi-camera material is not something this bench takes on.

In the parcel: your file exactly as it came; a second version that opens anywhere; a hash value for both; the clock difference as a number; the maker's viewer, or, where nobody supplied one, a written description of the container; and a note of where the footage started and every hand it has passed through since. Page one of the report states plainly that this laboratory holds no forensic accreditation — no ISO/IEC 17025 and no UKAS — and it is better to read that before you spend money than afterwards. That accreditation belongs to a statutory Code covering criminal proceedings in England and Wales alone. Civil work, family work, employment and insurance instructions all sit outside it. For civil work the report is written to the expert's duty under CPR Part 35.

One of these, from start to finish.

NG · NTG-2026-2022ON THE LOG ✓

A licensing hearing a fortnight off, and a disc nobody could open

Two weeks out from a licensing hearing, a Lace Market bar sent four video files to its solicitor with a viewer that would not install, into a practice running Macs. Reading the container out of the files themselves let the stream move into a format that plays; the original export was left as it was, and both were hashed. The recorder's clock turned out to be over half an hour fast, never adjusted when the hour changed, so that difference was reported as a number rather than left for the other side to raise.

The insurance claim brought to a closeExhibit-numbered export supplied

What helps, and what does damage.

Worth doing first

Ask for the export, not a trimmed clip
Ask for the viewer on the disc too
Take down the recorder's make and model
Copy the entire folder across, not only the video

What makes it harder

Converting it over and over until it plays
Filming the monitor with a phone and calling it the file
Tidying the filenames up
Expecting a conversion to sharpen anything

What gets asked before posting.

Nothing on this computer will open the disc. Why?

Because it is not video in a shape your machine recognises. The recorder built its own wrapper round the picture and labelled the streams to a private scheme, so a general-purpose player has nothing it can act on. In most cases the file itself is perfectly sound; the program you are aiming at it is the wrong one.

The viewer will not run on my Mac.

It was never going to. Almost every one of these viewers is a Windows executable, and a couple will speak only to the exact model that produced the disc. Send it here instead and you get back something that opens on anything, alongside your own export exactly as it arrived.

Does converting it make the image clearer?

No, and treat any firm that claims otherwise with caution. Either the camera caught the detail or it did not, and conversion cannot add it afterwards. Handled carefully, the copy matches the recording. Handled badly, it sheds frames or distorts the shape of the picture, which is why your original goes home beside it.

How much can I trust the time in the corner of the picture?

Not a great deal, as a rule. Recorder clocks wander, a good many were entered wrongly on the day of fitting, and very few get adjusted when the hour changes. Here the time is compared against a reference and the difference recorded as a number, so the point does not have to be argued later.

Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.

What the recorder still holds → Dashcam or bodycam clips → What the report contains → Jobs that end up in court →

Power the recorder down before the loop reaches your clip.

Cut the power to the DVR before anything else — while it runs it keeps writing, and the oldest footage goes first. Then post it in. The first look is free, CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT quoted in writing before anything starts, and what is on that disk goes no further than the bench.

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The price, and what happens next