Fix "moov atom not found" and get your MP4 playing again.
If your player says "moov atom not found," the footage is usually still there — just the index that points to it is missing. Upload the file and we'll rebuild it.
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There's nothing to repair. If it still looks broken, the issue may be the player, codec, or viewer on your device rather than the file itself.
We couldn't recover this one.
The file is too damaged to rebuild, so there is nothing to preview and no charge.
Have another clip from the same device?
A healthy video recorded on the same device — ideally the same settings — gives the repair engine a template to rebuild from. It can unlock repairs that fail on their own.
Unrepaired files are kept encrypted for up to 30 days, then deleted.
FileFix can't fix that kind of file yet.
Right now we repair video, audio, document, and image files (MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, AVI, TS, MTS, M2TS, MPG, MPEG, VOB, 3GP, WebM, FLV, M4A, WAV, MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, AIFF, XLSX, DOCX, PPTX, ODT, ZIP, PDF, AI, HEIC, and HEIF). We're adding support for more formats over time.
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FileFix can often repair this kind of damage if the file is recoverable.
Why the moov atom goes missing
"moov atom not found" is one of the most common video errors, and it sounds worse than it usually is. QuickTime-family files such as MP4, MOV, M4V, and 3GP have a small block of data — called the moov atom — that acts as the file's table of contents. It records where each piece of footage lives, how long the video runs, and how to play it back. The actual video and audio sit in a separate, much larger block.
When a recording is interrupted — a dead battery, a full card, a crash, an ejected drive — the camera often writes all the footage but never gets to write that table of contents. The footage is intact. The map is missing. So every player opens the file, looks for the moov atom, doesn't find it, and stops with this exact error.
If the file arrived by download or a chat app rather than straight off a camera, check the transfer before anything else. The moov atom commonly sits at the very end of the file, so a transfer that was cut off removes exactly that piece — and a complete re-download or re-send needs no repair at all. Files that came straight off an interrupted recording have no cleaner copy to fetch, which is when a rebuild is the remaining option.
It also matters which copy you work on. Rebuild from the original file — the one the camera or app wrote — rather than a copy another tool has already tried to fix. The open-source tool untrunc is the honest do-it-yourself route: it can rebuild the index, but it needs a healthy reference clip recorded on the same device with the same settings to use as a template, and it runs from the command line.
Because the footage itself is usually fine, this is one of the most recoverable video problems there is. FileFix reads the footage that's present, reconstructs a valid moov atom around it, and rebuilds a file that plays normally. You'll see the result in a free preview, including exactly how much we recovered, before you pay anything.
The one case we can't fix: if the file is genuinely empty or the footage block itself never got written, there's no data to rebuild an index around. When that's true, we tell you plainly and don't charge you.
What we can and can't fix
We can usually fix
- The file has real footage but is missing or has a damaged moov atom — the classic interrupted-recording case.
We can't fix
- The file is genuinely 0 bytes, or the footage block itself is gone (not just the index). There's nothing to rebuild. More on that →
How it works
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Upload Drop a supported video file in. It uploads over an encrypted connection. The repair runs automatically — no person watches your file.
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Free Watermarked Preview You see a free watermarked preview and exactly how much we recovered.
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Pay & Download If it's right, you pay $19 once and download a clean, full-quality MP4.
About half of real-world corrupted files repair fully, and you always preview before paying.
See what's recoverable.
Free preview · pay only if it worked · private & auto-deleted
Related fixes
Questions
Not on its own — FFmpeg needs the moov atom to read the file in the first place, so conversion and remux commands stop with the same error the player showed. Rebuilding the missing index is a separate job: untrunc does it with a healthy same-device clip as a template, and the rebuild here works from the footage in your file, with the result shown in a free preview.
A large file size is actually the good sign: it means the footage was written. What's missing is the small index that tells a player where that footage is, and a file with real footage and a missing index is exactly the case a rebuild recovers.
Renaming the extension changes nothing — the missing index is inside the file, not in its name. Re-encoders and converters have to read the file first, which is precisely the step that fails, so they report the same error.
Yes — it's uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed automatically with no person watching. Originals of successful repairs are deleted when your repair is delivered; unrepaired files are kept encrypted for up to 30 days, then deleted.
Then there's nothing to pay. You only pay after a preview you're happy with.
No. Upload the file and watch the free preview before paying.