WIP Manual: Recovering corrupted movies

IMPORTANT: These wiki pages are a draft of the end-user manual for EmuHawk. The manual will not live here forever; once it's finished, each new release will include a copy in the download.

This page was written for release 2.9.1 and will not reflect more recent changes. The information also may not be accurate to older versions. Unless specified, all functions are available on every supported OS.

If you're reading this, the worst has happened: EmuHawk/TAStudio isn't able to open your movie anymore, and you didn't have backups enabled.

The cause (and solution) is that .bk2 and .tasproj movies are actually .zip (Deflate) archives. You can use standard tools to read and edit them.

• On GNU+Linux:
  If ark/file-roller is unable to open an archive, you can pass -F to zip (Info-ZIP) to attempt recovery (pass twice to "try harder"). For example:

   zip -FF corrupt.bk2 --out recovered.bk2

• On Windows:
  7-Zip may recover files upon opening a corrupt archive. You should make a backup first. Windows probably won't suggest 7-Zip unless you first change the file extension to .zip. Extracting the contents and creating a new archive should result in a movie that can be loaded. Don't forget to change the file extension afterwards.

If your .tasproj is definitely readable but still does not load in TAStudio, then close EmuHawk, open up the archive, and delete the file called GreenZone (not GreenZoneSettings.txt, though that should be safe to delete too).

Note: This does not apply to .bk2 movies as they do not contain a GreenZone file.

The GreenZone is the cache of savestates that let TAStudio instantly jump near any frame you seek to. For unknown reasons, it often gets corrupted, and this accounts for most cases of unreadable movies.

The rest of a .tasproj's contents are described in the TAStudio project spec.

If the movie still won't load, you may be able to manually recover your inputs from the archive. The files Input Log.txt, SyncSettings.json, and Header.txt together should be enough to recreate the movie.

• Quick method:
  Open Input Log.txt and copy the inputs (the part between [Input] and [/Input]), then open TAStudio and paste them in.
• Thorough method:
  Start a movie recording (.bk2) and immediately save and close it. Open the new movie in 7-Zip/Ark/etc. and replace its copies of Input Log.txt, SyncSettings.json, and Header.txt with the ones from the corrupted movie. Once it's saved, re-open it in EmuHawk.

The 3 files mentioned here, along with the rest of a .bk2's contents, are described in the BizHawk Movie v2 spec.