Fixing broken AVI indexes

Recently I opened an .avi movie in VLC and the program indicated that the file’s index was broken. I’ve done very little in the way of video editing and, even now, I don’t completely understand what this means. I did understand, after a bit of Googling, that such files (with bad indexes) typically cannot be be fast forwarded, paused, etc. Anyway, I found a post that suggested three programs for fixing bad .avi indexes. I was already familiar with VirtualDub, and, already had it installed on my PC. I had never heard of the other two, but downloaded them to add to my software library. All of them are freeware, which is good. I decided to post them here, for my own reference (primarily). I’m re-encoding the file, right now, with VirtualDub. I’ll update this post with the results.

Update

I re-encoded a number of broken avi files with VirtualDub and – boom – no more warnings about broken indexes from VLC. I saved them with a couple of different video and audio compression formats….

While there not particular instructive, here’a a copy of some comment I found on a messageboard:

Try Avidemux.
Do File/save as with the container AVI and video and audio both set to the default “copy”.
That usually works.
And/or Virtualdub: Set video and audio to “Direct stream copy”; then File/Save as AVI.
Sometimes I run them both. Each seems to fix different problems.
This is very fast, as the video is not reencoded.
Play it later to check sync. You can use Avidemux to adjust delay if necessary (use the “shift” box below audio).
Or use divfixpp.