Video Woes

In McGuff's and Little's excellent "Body by Science", they advocate for strength-training with slow lifts (to remove any helping momentum) and to measure the Time Under Load rather than just number of repetitions, to get a more fine-grained control over your progress (or lack thereof). However, to concentrate on the weights and the clock at the same time is, of course, a drag. Better to film oneself and analyse the video after the workout - and which is the most ubiquitous movie camera around these days? Right, your mobile phone.

This scheme worked well for a number of workouts until the camera app in my phone crashed while recording, giving me a video no player will play. Why? Because the 3gp format of my phone (basically a mp4 variant with more compression) slaps on the frame index and codec information last in the file - and when the app crashes in mid-recording, no such index is added and the file ends up an inaccessible pile of junk data...

So, would I be forced to write-off the workout as a session without any data to track? Not without a fight. Some googling revealed that Federico Ponchio's Untrunc and Grau's Video Repair Software were the two most promising candidates. Both produced something from my broken video - unfortunately, Untrunc slapped on some codec all my players were missing (and that wasn't easily installable) but, luckily, Grau's program worked well, at least for the video - the audio become unsynced.

Alas, not only are the video and audio out of sync, it seems the video is somewhat in slow motion as well, so it turned out to be unusable for my post-workout analysis anyway. Too bad, but at least I got a story to tell out of it...