The short version: drop your unplayable GoPro clip here and it's diagnosed on your machine in seconds, for free. Damaged-but-readable files are repaired right in the browser today; full index reconstruction for truncated, power-loss recordings is still in development. Either way the file is read locally and 0 bytes are uploaded — you can confirm it yourself in your browser's Network tab. The one honest limit: a clip that reads 0 KB has nothing to repair, because that's an SD-card recovery problem, not a repair one.
Repair your GoPro file now
- Drop the file
- Repair runs locally
- Download the result
If the camera's built-in repair already failed you (or the card is out of the camera and you're at a computer), drop the file above. The diagnosis runs on your machine and confirms whether it's the classic truncated-recording case before anything else happens.
Engine status, honestly: the structural remux repair (damaged but readable files) runs today; full index reconstruction for truncated recordings is in development. The diagnosis tells you which case your file is, free, in seconds.
First, try the free official fix: the SOS icon
Most GoPro repair guides skip this because it doesn't sell software. GoPro cameras ship with a built-in repair: when the camera powers on and finds a video that wasn't finalized, it shows a bandage icon (older models: a bicycle with a plus sign) or the words "REPAIRING FILE". That's the SOS repair offering to fix your file, on the camera, for free.
- Trigger it: press any button while the icon shows. The camera rebuilds the file's index directly on the card.
- Its limits: it only fixes truncated (unfinalized) files, and only ones recorded by that same camera model. Footage from another camera, or files already copied and altered, are outside its reach.
- If it loops — the icon returns on every boot or "REPAIRING FILE" never finishes: power off, remove the battery and the SD card, reseat both, and power back on to let it retry once cleanly.
If the SOS repair worked, you're done — no tool needed, ours included. If it looped, failed, or never appeared, read on.
When the in-camera repair fails
The failure behind almost every unplayable GoPro clip is an interrupted recording: battery died mid-ride, the camera was knocked off and lost power, the card filled up mid-take, or the card was pulled before the camera finished writing. A GoPro writes footage to the card continuously but writes the file's index (the map players need) only when the recording stops cleanly. Interrupt that, and the card holds your real footage inside a file with no map:
That's the case in-browser repair addresses when the camera's own attempt can't: rebuild the index around the footage that survived, working on a copy of the file, on your machine.
Why not upload 4K footage
GoPro files are enormous — five minutes of 4K runs around 2 GB. Upload-based repair sites make you push all of that through your connection before they can even say whether the file is fixable. In-browser repair inverts the order: the file is read locally, the verdict arrives in seconds, and the footage never travels. The free tier covers files up to 500 MB; longer 4K clips take a single €5.90 repair with no size cap, never charged if it fails.
What this can and can't fix
Truncated GoPro recordings (the interrupted-power cases above) are the good case: the footage survived, and rebuilding structure around surviving data is exactly what repair does. The bad cases are different problems wearing the same symptoms. A file that reads 0 KB, or a card the computer can't read at all, is an SD-card recovery problem: the bytes have to be brought back from the card before there's a file to repair. Do recovery first, then repair what it returns — in that order. And the seconds the camera never wrote (in its buffer when power died) don't exist in any file, so no repair can include them.