MPEG video chopping software

Posted by: andym

MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 17:04

I've given up on making the inbuilt editing features of mythtv and nuvexport work properly. It doesn't seem to work past the first edit, emails to the mailing list have gone unanswered. So I'm going to try and manually cut out the adverts. I looked at GOPChop which looked rather promising, does anyone else have anything that allows me to edit without recoding?
Posted by: Dignan

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 17:09

Have you looked into Virtualdub? I believe it does this. Plus it's free.

I do know that when I've had to use it for re-encoding or converting, it's been extremely fast depending on the settings you use, so it may not be as much of a time dump as other programs.

*edit*
What format are you capturing in?
Posted by: andym

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 18:00

Whoops, sorry I forgot to mention my house is now Windows free. So it needs to be something either linux or OS X flavored. The files in question are MPEG2-PS....
Posted by: Daria

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 18:54

mpegitor might work, but I haven't tried it yet.
Posted by: mcomb

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 19:05

A search for "mpeg split" on VersionTracker turns up a couple of OS X utilities that might work. I haven't personally used either.

-Mike
Posted by: David

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 20:01

I've been looking for a good MPEG editor for MacOS X for about a year. Not found one yet.

If you want a visual editor, there is MissingMpegEdit, but it is a bit of a messy solution (it's an Applescript that combines command-line utilities with Quicktime player) and everything needs to be just right or it chokes.

Since I have a Windows box available I've given up and resorted to VideoReDo recently and despite the ugly interface, it works well.
Posted by: andym

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 20:27

mpegitor looks like it might do the trick although I'll have to burn a DVD to find out. Which brings me to another question, can you take an iDVD .dvdproj file and burn it on something else? I've not got a DVD burner on the iBook but a perfectly good one on the Myth box.
Posted by: drakino

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 20:40

MPEG Streamclip is decent for OS X for being nearly free. (needs the Apple MPEG-2 component).

Sadly I still don't have an easy way of editing commercials from my ReplayTV MPEG2 files and burning them to DVD. Every way I try seems to enjoy retranscoding the files for no reason, usually into DV then back to MPEG 2. This leads to some horrible results since the source is interlaced to start with, but gets re-encoded progressive with no attempt to deinterlace.
Posted by: tonyc

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 05/01/2005 22:42

Quote:

Sadly I still don't have an easy way of editing commercials from my ReplayTV MPEG2 files and burning them to DVD.

I don't do DVDs, but wouldn't it just be a matter of running
RTVTools to spit out an MPEG without the commercials, then do a single transcode to burn it to a DVD? When I archive my shows, I just DVArchive them over and run:
evtdump "$NAME.evt" | rtvedit
(both those utils are part of the RTVtools package.) At that point, I've got a ReplayTV-format MPEG file minus the commercials. Then, I just use mencoder to transcode them to MPEG4. Why would you need to do more than a single transcode?

Apologies if you're already doing something similar and I'm missing something obvious about the situation.
Posted by: tfabris

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 01:48

Quote:
I've been looking for a good MPEG editor for MacOS X for about a year. Not found one yet.

I find that astonishing. I thought the Mac was The Platform for video editing.
Posted by: gbeer

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 02:19

I would expect that to be in Quicktime.
Posted by: Daria

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 04:52

Quote:
Quote:
I've been looking for a good MPEG editor for MacOS X for about a year. Not found one yet.

I find that astonishing. I thought the Mac was The Platform for video editing.


It is, if you are doing it professionally and buy the tools.
Posted by: drakino

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 05:38

Quote:
At that point, I've got a ReplayTV-format MPEG file minus the commercials

Does it use the ReplayTV commercial markers, or let you graphicially edit them out yourself? I have found the replay commercial skip to be nice, but not 100%, thus I need to manually edit.

The next step beyond that is getting the files into a DVD burnable format complete with menus. This is typicially where a transcode comes in beyond my control trying to use either iDVD (after first having to transcode to DV first), or with Toast (Where whatever "encoding" it does manages to make a DVD hold maybe 60 minutes and look bad.)

I have no interest in doing this on a Windows PC, as my Wintendo and Media PC lack DVD burners. If I invest in anything, it will be software that does what I want on the Mac side. How well Fian Cut Express does is beyond me, but for now that seems a bit extreme for simple cutting of video. That, and $300 later, I still would have the DVD problem.
Posted by: David

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 08:57

MPEG Streamclip is decent for OS X for being nearly free. (needs the Apple MPEG-2 component).

Hurrah! Finally a Mac MPEG editor that seems to work with everything I've thrown at it so far. Thank you!

Sadly I still don't have an easy way of editing commercials from my ReplayTV MPEG2 files and burning them to DVD.

Have you tried Sizzle for burning DVDs? You can just drag-and-drop a bunch of MPEG2 files into it and it creates a DVD disk image with a menu.
Posted by: drakino

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 09:39

Quote:
I find that astonishing. I thought the Mac was The Platform for video editing.


It is in many ways in the higher up areas of people using $10,000 cameras and such. Up in that arena, the tools like Final Cut are usually regarded as the best. Two problems though. Those tools are geared towards the people shooting content and creating the finished product, not necessarily to be easy to use just for making cuts to the final product. The other of course is cost.

iMovie and iDVD are not geared towards people taking content from a box like a ReplayTV. They are geared to owners of the $500 digital camcorders who want to make DVDs of the kids first step. Just as Windows Movie Maker is also not geared towards people trying to do this.

So, for people trying to archive stuff off that box, you have to find the right tools out there, since they don't come in the computer package, nor are sold in the big $1000 software boxes. Thankfully it looks like David and I exchanged the keystone software we needed, I'm prepping to do a test burn to DVD-RW now to see the result.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 12:06

I'd just like to take another opportunity to make a plug for a program on the PC-side. DVDlab is, IMO, the best non-professional DVD creation software on Windows. Frankly, with the number and type of advanced capabilities it has, it could be pretty professional. I've tried a couple dozen (literally) DVD creation programs, and this is the only one that hits it just right AFAIC.

That, coupled with a wide variety of very good free tools, makes me thing that the PC may be better than the Mac when it comes to amatuer DVD creation.


ps-another good thing about DVDlab is that they've got a good pricing scheme going. I paid $79 a while ago, but $99 for the standard version is still good compared to the obscene prices of other software out there. I'm even planning on paying the other $100 to get the pro version. That's still good in comparison to something like Adobe's DVD creator, which is over $500.
Posted by: tonyc

Re: MPEG video chopping software - 06/01/2005 20:52

Quote:

Does it use the ReplayTV commercial markers, or let you graphicially edit them out yourself? I have found the replay commercial skip to be nice, but not 100%, thus I need to manually edit.

It uses the CS markers, but the file that the evtdump util generates can be edited with a text editor. If that's not sufficient and you need a GUI to do the job, ISTR there was a utility to graphically edit the file and save new commercial markers, but I forget the name.

Yeah, commercial skip is not 100%, but it's close enough for my purposes. Generally, when it misses, it doesn't chop content, it just includes a commercial, and it's not worth my time to fix those mistakes when I archive. If a commercial or two is included, so be it.

Quote:
I have no interest in doing this on a Windows PC

RTVTools binaries are included for, I believe, Win32 and i386 Linux. I forget if the source is readily available or not. I use the Linux versions since that's where all my files live.