Imagine you took your daughter’s first birthday party on your mobile phone and when wanting to share it with your family, the video is no longer playing. Ouch! that’s what chief4life11 thought when posting for help. Fortunately we could help him bringing back the clip.

3GP file format is a compressed file format of a larger video file. It acts like a container where several video files of small storage capacity are stored. These files have extension of either .3gpp, .3gp or .3g2.

Unlike any other file container, .3gp files are small in size and because of this feature, this file format is used frequently for small hand held devices like mobile phones. However sometimes users have to face the problem of being not playable due to deletion or corruption of such files.

There are several reasons for loss of 3GP video files. Most of the time culprit is the lack of space left on your memory card. Other times simply your phone got locked up and required a battery pull making the file not get properly saved.

Due to any of the unforeseen reasons file gets inaccessible and throws various type of error messages. In such circumstances, backup files will surely helps you a lot but in case it is unavailable then you can take the help of MP4repair.org to repair your damaged .3gp files.

Alternatively you could try to change the container using ffmpeg to copy the contents of the damaged .3gp file into a new mp4 container. Just type below command in your system’s prompt to get it done.

ffmpeg -i input.3gp -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4

(Please note that you would need to have installed ffmpeg on your system and you need to change the name of the files shown to match your damaged files.)