title_body: Video being indexed on SD card, but no duration time and no actual video recorded I am using an HS-Series Holy Stone drone. I was able to get one video recording, but every subsequent video recording indexes the recording, but no duration time, and no actual video in it even when it says it has 23 Mb of video.
  I am using VLC to view it since my MacBook Pro does not support .avi files.
  What is going on?
  Here is the VLC UI:
  
  Notice how the first recording shows 00:59 seconds, but each subsequent recording I tried, shows no Duration, yet at least one of them has 25MB...of what I have no idea.
upvoted_answer: Given that the drone camera is a cheap model from China, I think it's entirely possible that the camera modules is broken and could be outputting incorrectly terminated .avi files.
  In earlier comments, you explain that no files are created when a known-good SD card is used to record video with the drone. My prior experience with camera modules for cheap Chinese-made RTF (ready-to-fly) drones has shown that there can be serious quality issues with the recorders. I used to have a Syma X5 model which I upgraded with the OEM camera module. The whole camera solution was shoddily made and implemented.
  Based on the observations with the files created on the first SD card, one of which is unplayable but &gt;0 bytes in size and the others which are entirely empty, this seems likely. Zero-size or otherwise corrupted video files are a common symptom of an incorrectly-terminated video stream. The .avi file format supports many kinds of video streams (wiki), but the drone camera most likely uses some kind of MPEG codec with interframe compression, which is more susceptible to corruption or incorrect stream termination than a full-frame uncompressed stream.