OBS or screen recording won't open? Your frames are almost certainly safe.

The app crashed, the Mac restarted, or you force-quit mid-recording — and now the file won't open in the editor, or won't open at all. With screen recorders this is usually a fragmented MP4 problem, and it's fixable.

Why screen recordings break differently

OBS and most screen recorders deliberately write fragmented MP4: instead of one big index at the end (which a crash would destroy), they write many small moof fragments as they go. That's great for crash-safety — your frames survive on disk — but it leaves two failure modes:

• The recording was never finalized — the last fragment is incomplete and strict players refuse the whole file.
• The editor doesn't accept fragmented MP4 at all — many timelines and platforms want the classic single-index layout.

How to recover it with ClipMend (macOS)

1. Drop the recording into ClipMend → Analyze. The free diagnosis detects the fragmented structure and what state it's in.
2. Press Rescue — ClipMend walks the fragments, drops the broken tail if there is one, and rebuilds everything into a standard MP4 with a proper index.
3. Frames are copied 1:1 — screen text stays pixel-sharp, no re-encode, audio recovered.

Everything runs locally. Work calls, product demos, NDA material — nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Tips to avoid this next time

• In OBS, keep fragmented MP4 / MKV as the recording format (it's what makes crashes survivable) — and remux to MP4 after recording.
• Don't record to a nearly-full disk; running out of space mid-write is the one case that genuinely loses the tail.

FAQ