It only takes a little damage to corrupt an AVI movie. Some tweaked bits here, maybe a few missing bytes there, and suddenly you may find the picture breaks up at one point, or maybe the video will no longer play at all.

DivXRepair could offer a simple solution, though. Just launch this compact portable tool, add your broken video, click the Repair button, and in theory at least that’s it. There’s no need to worry about keyframes or other technicalities – the program will scan your video, skip any bad frames, and try to save everything else in a “fixed” version of the movie (the original will remain untouched).

The simple interface means your videos can be repaired in a couple of clicks

Does this work? To find out, we took a few sample AVIs and tried simulating corruption by zeroing large chunks of their content. And on the first few occasions DivXRepair lived up to its name, quickly stripping out the broken section of video and leaving us only with the playable remnants.

It didn’t always work so well, though. Sometimes the program didn’t carry out any repairs at all. And on other occasions it would report the presence of “bad frames”, but then hang up part-way through the repair process. Which wasn’t so encouraging.

Still, by way of compensation DivXRepair is portable, a single 881KB executable, and it does deliver good results at least some of the time – so it’s probably worth having a copy around, “just in case”.

But for more reliable results you’ll probably need to look elsewhere. VLC Media Player, for instance, will often pick up AVI video problems automatically and can rebuild indexes and solve other issues with a click.