God damn. The recovered video is an amazing improvement. I hope the special FFMpeg version finds some more use in the future - that seems like a massively beneficial spin off tool.
Sadly recovery was mostly manual guess work. There was some talk of modelling distortions, but manual process was too advanced at that point.
Most of this could of been avoided if SpaceX used SDR to receive that video signal. Its vastly easier to recover when you have original distorted I/Q than trying to guess what went wrong in hardware black box receiver. Original Video transport stream is encapsulated, encoded and modulated using one of the DVB-something schemes. Those provide robust FEC (error correction).
SpaceX provided file was a result of radio stream badly interpreted inside some black box receiver, there was no FEC any more to help automated recovery.
Lets hope SpaceX learned a lesson and will use SDR in the future (and bump up FEC rate to 1/2 in bad weather)
