Mencoder -edl with Comskip and ShowAnalyzer

[gnutech]

Erik,

I'll do you one better. You can access my complete video library with LimeWire.

Using LimeWire browse to my GB-PVR by hostname new.dyndns.org.

I've been testing comskip on the Dr. Suess and South Park video's.

This way you can test however many and whatever video files you want.

Thanks, again, for your help.

Respectfully,


Gary

P.S. I have a sneaky feeling it is because of my Maui-III capture cards.

[erik]

Downloadeding the .mpg files did not work with limewire
Limewire says "need more sources"

[erik]

Thanks for the upload.
Indeed mencoder/mplayer does get confused by the negative start PTS if this particular recording. I have not seen it before and it could indeed be related to your recording card however it should not be a problem.
Nothing I can do about it.
But you could use mpeg2schnit to do the cutting,
Or you could try retime (see my web site) on the file to change the PTS and then try mencoder/mplayer

[gnutech]

Erik,

Thank you for looking into this for me. The strange thing is that the comskip EDL file works great within GB-PVR (auto-commercial skip). The issue is specific to mplayer/encoder. Does GB-PVR retime when streaming to the MediaMVP?

I am wondering if someone in this forum that uses the Maui-III capture card could reproduce and verify this issue for us? I would greatly appreciate it.

In the mean time, I will attempt the retime process. Do you think I could get this to work in the first pass of a 2pass transcode with mencoder?

Thank you, again, for all your help.

Respectfully,


Gary

[sub]

I havnt had my Maui-III in my machine for a while, but this device is slightly different from other capture devices in that the timestamps dont start at zero, but this is apparently legal in the MPEG2 spec (but not common).

Does GB-PVR retime when streaming to the MediaMVP?

No, but when I first encoutered Maui recordings I did have to change the MVP support to correctly report the duration in the OSD (by subtracting the first timestamp). This is purely a cosmetic thing though, and doesnt affect the stream sent to the MVP.

[erik]

Why don't you run mencoder twice?
Like as is done in comclean2.
Once without cutpoints and once with cutpoints
the first run will repair the timeline and the second will do the cutting.

[gnutech]

Sub, Thanks for the info about the Maui-III.

Erik, I can run mencoder twice, but it seems less efficient. Do you think it would be possible for you to add a non-standard timestamp option to the comskip.ini that would detect and allow non-standard timestamps to be calculated from the initial timestamp and generate a modified EDL file that would work with mencoder? This seems like a better solution to me. Not to mention, it would encourage the economically abundent Maui card following to use your fabulous comskip program.

I would be more than willing to assist with testing.

Best Regards,


Gary

[erik]

Erik, I can run mencoder twice, but it seems less efficient. Do you think it would be possible for you to add a non-standard timestamp option to the comskip.ini that would detect and allow non-standard timestamps to be calculated from the initial timestamp and generate a modified EDL file that would work with mencoder?

I hate to say this but its better to submit a problem report to the mplayer/mencoder maintainers because that is where the error is.

The reason for not changing in comskip is that there are other cars that start with a non zero timestamp and I don'd want to make a card specific version of comskip.

[gnutech]

I understand. I'll see if I can pursue it with the folks at mplayer/mencoder.

Thank you for your assistance.

Respectfully,


Gary

[gnutech]

I tried both your retime.bat file and running mencoder twice. They each seemed to work nicely for remuxing the non-standard time of my Maui-III encodings. Both make it possible to remove commercials with standard EDL time stamps as generated by Comskip and ShowAnalyzer.

I think I've decided to go with running mencoder twice. Seems to be a little faster and I'm already using mencoder to remove the commercials, so I mine as well use it for remuxing, too. That way I don't have to rely on additional retime.bat files.

Here's my mencoder lines for other Maui-III users:

mencoder original.mpg -ovc copy -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -oac copy -o retimed.mpg

mencoder retimed.mpg -edl original.edl -oac copy -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -vf filmdint,softskip,harddup -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:keyint=18 -o output.mpg

This will retime, remove commercials, and output back to mpeg2 format using mencoder.

Thanks again for all the help.

Respectfully,


Gary