FB13723947: PhotoBooth repeatably creates corrupt videos

[nk9]

• Date: 2024-04-12
• Resolution: Open
• Area: Something else not on this list
• OS: macOS 14.1.2
• Type: Incorrect/Unexpected Behavior
• Keywords: corruption

Description

If you start a PhotoBooth movie and make a recording longer than about 5 minutes, the resulting file will not play. It appears in the PhotoBooth timeline as a video with 0:00 length and no preview. When it's exported, the file it saves also has no preview and can't be played by QuickTime or VLC. Lots of people have reported similar issues:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253429397?sortBy=best
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/z6nspa/anyone_else_having_this_issue_with_photobooth_wtf/
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=photo+booth+corrrupt+video

I successfully used the untrunc OSS utility to recover the first 1h40 of audio of a ~2h file created this way:

https://github.com/anthwlock/untrunc

Unfortunately, the video it produces is not properly synced to the audio. I had to send the video to a professional video decorruption service, and they have partially fixed it for me at a cost of $99. And even then, they weren't able to recover the last 15–30 minutes of audio and video content, or get the audio and video to sync perfectly.

I think it's absolutely unacceptable that PhotoBooth is producing corrupt videos. I made another 2h video using QuickTime, and it worked fine.

Ideally, PhotoBooth would save all its videos correctly. But if PhotoBooth can't make long videos, then it should limit the length of videos in a very obvious way so that it never produces corrupt files. Or just remove the video feature entirely.

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) (M1)
Sonoma 14.1.2