HELP!! Videos dont work!!

Chances are that I've caught a virus or something...in which case its fixed now...I think or rather hope. Regardless as to what the actual cause was, 90% of all the videos I have on my PC no longer plays right. By that I mean that the pictures dont show. The sound comes out no problem but the actual video doesnt play...on any program, I tried Windows Media, Winamp, Power DVD, Zoom Player, so on...NONE of them displayed the video and just played the sound, its like I've gone blind.

Another thing that happened was that almost all of them were converted to a "Video Clip" for a file type from their original winamp media file, etc. I tried renaming them as *****.avi, etc to convert them back but it didnt let me...That later fixed itself when I restarted the PC and than all of them were back to their original formats.

...so anyone have any ideas to what happened or if there are any ways to fix the videos?

...or am I just ultimately screwed and should've made back-ups of the vids from the beginning?

Always a thanx in advance for any help.:hattip:

Grumble Grumble Grumble

You did burn backup copies of all of those video files, right????

Get one of those utilities that recalculates the file CRC32 checksum of your video files. The original torrent link page of the group hosting the tracker will usually have the CRC checksum value posted along with the torrent link, or its included as a part of the file name. If the checksums don't match, it means that the virus/trojan has maliciously modified your video files to something unusable... (tough luck!)

(heres a simple CRC/checksum utility for windows... QuickSFV - Reviews and free QuickSFV downloads at Download.com )

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LenMiyata

You did burn backup copies of all of those video files, right????

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Nope, but I've learned my lesson from this and I think I'll splurge a little and buy either an external HD or a CD/DVD burner

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LenMiyata

Get one of those utilities that recalculates the file CRC32 checksum of your video files. The original torrent link page of the group hosting the tracker will usually have the CRC checksum value posted along with the torrent link, or its included as a part of the file name. If the checksums don't match, it means that the virus/trojan has maliciously modified your video files to something unusable... (tough luck!)

(heres a simple CRC/checksum utility for windows... QuickSFV - Reviews and free QuickSFV downloads at Download.com )

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Gave it a go and no such luck...I'm screwed...or so I thought.

I must apologize to you Len (and any other ppl thats read this thread and sought for a solution) for that I overlooked an obvious task that could and have helped me: System Restore.

Gave it a try and they all work again. So thank you Len for helping me. (although it didnt actually help me this time but thank you for the attempt) ^^;

~Please close the thread...and again I apologize for not going through the obvious solutions myself.

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Closed by request of the original poster...