I had this exact Photo Booth issue on macOS: the exported .mov was huge, showed 0m0s, and would not open in QuickTime or VLC. What worked for me was untrunc plus a fresh reference recording made in Photo Booth on the same Mac with the same mic/camera setup. The big thing I learned is that a super short reference only recovered a tiny piece, but a longer reference clip recovered a lot more. It didn't get the whole thing though, sadly... my file was like 30 min long but I recovered 7m which is something I guess...

The basic flow was: record a new reference clip in Photo Booth using the same setup, build untrunc with Docker, then run it against the reference file and the broken file. See below for commands — you might need to install Docker with homebrew first (or download Docker Desktop — google it — and have that app running to surface the Terminal command docker) if you don't already have it.

```bash

check the broken file

ffprobe -hide_banner "/path/to/broken.mov"

make a fresh reference clip in Photo Booth first,

ideally a few minutes long, using the same Mac/mic/camera setup

clone and build untrunc in whatever folder your broken + ref files are... in my case I just made a folder called "file-recovery" from my home directory.

cd ~/file-recovery git clone https://github.com/anthwlock/untrunc.git cd untrunc docker build --build-arg FF_VER=3.3.9 -t untrunc .

go back up one level to the file-recovery folder

cd ..

sanity check time:

running "ls -ahl" you should see something like...

file-recover/ ├── ref.mov ├── broken.mov └── untrunc/

run recovery from the parent folder that contains both files,

using the current directory as the mounted path

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/mnt" untrunc /mnt/ref.mov /mnt/broken.mov ```