DVR Recovery Vinyard .mcg frame structure and header

[odedshankar]

Hi Guys,

I am trying to do a recovery from a drive that was in a IVR-Q8 CCTV system and was re-initalized.
Data is there but i can't find any tool that will curve it out.
It uses the Vinyard *.mcg file type as the recorded media but obviously at this stage i can't see the files.
Does anyone knows what is the header and frame structure of the Vinyard .mcg ????
I may need to create a new header to search manually but don't know how it looks.


Thanks

[HaQue]

Hi,
There seems to be alot of this DVR stuff about recently. I thought I had read about that format recently, but I think after having a look it was a different system.

I wish I had time to delve into the file formats, I reckon it would be a fun project and useful.

I did however find this http://www.cctvforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13335&start=15:

Found the solution... you need the Vineyard player (with it's own codecs built-in)

NOW if anybody has a problem getting files or viewing files from Vineyard's .MCG format (used mostly for cheaper CCTV home security systems) The person who can fix it is Eric from www.datarecovery.com.au I can't put it up on a download page as I don't have one, but drop him a line.

He also extracted the video recordings from the hard disk for me.

I spent a bag of money getting him to write a de-coder for this damn Vineyard CCTV, so others may as well use it too!

Not an exact answer but may help you.

[odedshankar]

Cheers Mate, Thanks for your reply but i already had the Vineyard player and managed to extract footage using it.
But i wanted to figure out a way to understand the MCG file.
I spoke with Eric and he can do that, he wrote the codec for it.

[Cyber]

I'm also very interested to learn about the internals of the format.
Care to share the source code of the codec ?
Or a description (even better)
Or how to contact the author ?

[Arch Stanton]

Apparently you can not even decode the date of a forum message.

[fzabkar]

Or how to contact the author ?

I tried to track him down last year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/comments/1j1t911/global_data_recovery_alliance/

[HaQue]

Can't find the software but only the manual for the PC Viewer software

Attachments

020785437.pdf

(426.37 KiB) Downloaded 56 times

[eric]

Hi this is Eric.
I worked on this system quite a while back. I did a recovery for a client in Australia and one for DHS in USA.
Can I help? I still have the code I wrote and can remember the FS quite well
I sold the domain name datarecovery.com.au to Payam DR when I retired.
You can contact me here. I will watch for your response.

Regards,

Eric

[Cyber]

Oops, I did not notice the follow up here, apologies, 'Notify me' is now checked.
I did follow up on the PMs of course. Thank you everybody.

Apparently you can not even decode the date of a forum message.

Oh boy, Joep didn't have his coffee yet, LOL. What are you even implying, Joep ? I did see the date Joep, but age doesn't matter Be nice, it's me, your neighbor, now down under.

Can't find the software but only the manual for the PC Viewer software

Thank you for looking HaQue, I will have a look at the manual.

You can contact me here. I will watch for your response

Thank you Eric, I responded to your PM.

Thanks everybody

[HaQue]

if you have the player, maybe you can just reverse engineer it

[eric]

if you have the player, maybe you can just reverse engineer it

RE'ing a codec is no trivial task, even with IDA.
I thought I posted somewhere the type of encoding scheme used. Might have been a PM.
I'll have a look and post here with any result.

Eric

[eric]

Results of search-
The compression used is H.264 without a container. You should be able to put it in an mp4 container and play in VLC. Check the developer info in VLC for method. May be able to play in VLC with the right settings. Chunk length is 8192 bytes.
Looks like there is a plugin for VLC for H.264 decode here - https://wiki.videolan.org/H.264/

Eric

[HaQue]

Thanks for the info Eric!

[eric]

Thanks for the info Eric!

You're welcome.
BUT...
I was just looking through some of the links and some are broken. The github projects are no longer there. There is supposed to be a VLC plugin. Might be better to run VLC on Linux.
Rumours that I wrote the (or a) codec are greatly exaggerated! (apologies Mark Twain!) I had the player but I had to RE the file system So that I could establish date and time of files and ensure accurate allocation data was recovered. No leaks. The directory blocks have the file entries. There are no filenames, just date, time and allocation blocks. The directory is circular. There is no free space as such. The files are written like a tape loop. There must have been some logic to decide what to do in the event that the disc was about to loop. As I never had a DVR, I couldn't establish that. New files overwrote old files from behind and video data with no headers was available for raw recovery.

I hope this helps.

Eric