During Episode 184 (March 29, 2011), Wirecast closed itself abruptly due to a crashed MSVCR90.dll. We promptly picked things back up by re-firing the application and jumping straight back to viewer questions before people really noticed anything was up.

This is all fine and good, but come 8pm when we sign off the air, it's time for me to check to make sure the files are all okay for the record-to-disk.

With regret, the first 20 minutes were badly damaged due to the crash, or so it seemed. None of our installed applications on Windows 7 would open the file. Media Player wouldn't play it. PowerDirector wouldn't open it. Xilisoft wouldn't convert it. I'm in trouble. I answered some viewer questions in the first 20 minutes of the show, and I really would feel bad to lose those, especially considering some of the viewers involved may not be tuning in live, but might plan to catch the episode on the RSS feeds.

Rather than monkeying with the file too long on Windows (which was proving to be a futile effort), I zipped the file across my network to my Ubuntu Linux laptop.

Of course, Linux will save the day—it always does!

I try opening the "corrupt" video file by double-clicking it. Welcome to Linux: it just worked. Totem started playing the file no problem, even though Windows was hopeless to open it. The irony to me is that the files are recorded in WMV format. Last time I checked, the ".wmv" in my filename stands for "Windows Media Video". Typical.

Great! So Linux can open my botched Windows video file. Now, to get it to the point where viewers can also enjoy the video, regardless of what platform they're on.

A simple command in the terminal to tell ffmpeg to read and re-write the video in full quality... And there we have it—ffmpeg has, after only a few minutes, created a duplicate of the original file, but without the corrupted bits. I throw it back over to Windows and sure enough, it loads right up.

Xilisoft merges the two files together into a nice quality WMV, and off it goes to Blip.tv for conversion to h.264 and our other online formats for global distribution.

Once again, Linux (and ffmpeg) saves the day.