I received a query today about meeting recordings being corrupted when they have been retrieved using Purview eDiscovery. This post will show you how to successfully extract them from a Purview data export.
For those new to Purview eDiscovery (it’s a fine art to get searches right) but in this case fairly it's thankfully straightforward. Meeting recordings are saved in the OneDrive of the user recording the meeting, so if you know who recorded the meeting you can scope down to a single OneDrive then use a file type condition to only search for mp4 files. If you don't know who recorded it then you may need to search for keywords across all OneDrive’s, in this case I'd really recommend constraining to a date window.
I ran a quick search to export a meeting recording that I'd created, and low and behold after exporting the contents and trying to play the mp4 file, I could see the issue that was referenced (0xC00D36C4):
I initially tried to upload the file to OneDrive to see if it would play within the native Stream player (it wouldn’t) so this lead me to think that either Purview is corrupting the file (unlikely) or that the file format isn’t quite what it is masquerading as.
As it turns out, my suspicion was right and if we rename our .mp4 file to a .zip file we can extract it. Within the archive, you’ll then find the legitimate mp4 plus some JSON metadata files such as the transcript and meeting properties.
Notes:
You may get an error saying that the path is too long for one of the files to extract, if you don’t need the metadata files, then you can ignore this, otherwise move the whole archive further up the Windows Explorer folder structure and try again
If you haven’t enabled the “Show file extensions” in Windows Explorer you’ll need to do that before you can rename and change the file extension to zip, this is shown below (in Windows 11)
Here’s the resulting extracted data, including a fully playable mp4 file. Let me know if this has been useful or if you want to see more posts on Microsoft Purview!
Comments