wtf is lumix-mdt-repair?

This tool recovers video footage from Panasonic LUMIX cameras when a recording gets interrupted, for example by a dead battery or a card failure. When that happens, the camera leaves behind a file with the extension .MDT instead of a normal .MP4. The actual video and audio data is still inside that file, but the index that tells video players where each frame is located was never finished writing, so the file will not play normally. The tool rebuilds that missing index by scanning through the raw file directly. For video, it walks through the stream frame by frame using markers that the LUMIX camera's format always includes, which lets it record where every frame starts and ends. For audio, since AAC sound data does not have those same clear markers, the tool uses your computer's existing audio decoding library to figure out exactly how many bytes each audio frame took up. To get technical details right, like frame rate and how frames should be reordered for smooth playback, it needs a second, healthy video clip recorded on the exact same camera with the same settings, and it copies that structure over as a template. Before touching the broken file, the tool can run a self test that proves its method actually works correctly for your specific camera and settings, by rebuilding the index of the healthy reference clip and comparing it exactly against the original. By default, the tool never modifies your broken file directly. It either creates a brand new repaired copy, or, for very large files, can carefully patch just a small part of the original file in a way that can be fully undone later. It runs on Python and works on Mac and Linux, requiring an additional shared library called ffmpeg for audio recovery specifically, though video-only recovery needs nothing extra installed. It is released under the MIT license.