How do you turn off scene detection?

[smtap]

Here's my problem... I'm trying to dump some old VHS home video to digital. There are probably 4 hours spread out over 100+ short clips on one tape alone. In-between many of these clips is a short break of nothing, resulting in a blue screen. Both WinTV and GB-PVR reset the time stamp every time this happens. This produces a file that has inconstant time stamps throughout, and ultimately I end up with a 4 hour video that thinks its only a few minutes long, simply because there was a blue screen shortly before the end. This file is totally unusable for editing. I can play it just fine in Windows Media Player an VideoLAN, but nothing can pull up the clips correctly for editing because of the jacked-up time. The time problem is there in the players as well, but they at least can play it. VideoLAN is the only reason I even figured out what was happening, because it actually shows the time reset to zero at every blue screen as you click along the progress bar. I tried turning off the commercial detection in GB-PVR, but that didn't do the trick. I don't see any other options that jump out to me as possibilities. Has anyone else encountered this? Does anyone know how to get around this problem? Thanks.

[McBainUK]

What is the type of file? I would try and find a tool that can take the video file and "retime" it so it can be useable for editing. http://www.videohelp.com may be a good resource (and google of course).

[martint123]

I've not seen this before, what input tuner/device are you using?
VideoRedo is good at fixing timelines and also for editing, but not a feeebie - but there may be a time/save size limited demo to see if it would do the job.

[smtap]

The file is just an mpg. The retime utility looks promising. I will give that a shot. I'm using a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250, recording through the composite video input.

[smtap]

Well, I was hopefully that retime would do the trick, but alas no. It gives me an error saying "Invalid MPEG2 Video stream, no picture coding extension present." I'll look through the videohelp site in the morning. Too tired to think anymore at this point.

[dennit]

The file is just an mpg. The retime utility looks promising. I will give that a shot. I'm using a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250, recording through the composite video input.

I don't know if you've already transferred all your tapes, and want to fix the mpg files, or have just started the transfer process, but you may want to try dvr-ms format. It seems to be the best at producing a good timeline.