Mageia forum

downloaded a large .MKV file, and it's mostly fine, except the bits that make VLC crash, so instead of downloading it all over again and finding the orginal is the one that's broken, is there any software that can comb through it frame by frame and fix it?

VLC just crashes silently while playing it or are you doing something like seeking or anything else than just watching? You may want to try to start vlc inside a terminal and then play the file to see why VLC crashes from that video. Also, what video and audio codecs are used in that file?

AFAIK there's no tool to automatically repair arbitrary errors in some video. VLC and others can do reindexing, if the timeindex got broken. Or you could try to reencode it to another video with avidemux f.ex. to see if that can fix your problems, but you can just repair it, as you need to know what's broken beforehand.