cutting movies within gbpvr

[dottore]

hi all, with comskip and the automatic commercial cut-plugin we sure have nice cutting abilities. and myvideos does the burning job.
but how about a builtin cutter? i mean, a plugin, where you can define cutpoints with your remote. the plugin would show a still picture from the movie, pressing fast forward or so would jump minutes or seconds forward and show another picture. a timeline would display the cutpoints and the actual position.

there are two ways of using this: correct the comskip-cutpoints or using this without comskip (like i would do, because comskip won't work very well in germany). a cutted mpeg would then be generated and one could burn this file onto dvd with myvideos.

i have found sample code to do this. the sample code can generate screenshots from a movie within c#. and i could do this plugin. here are my questions:

- is this interesting for any other people except me?
- wouldn't it be better to include this ability to myvideos? with the popup-menu you could cut the file, it will be sent to the mydvd-section where you can burn it.

i would code a little bit and then send the code to reven, so he can include it in myvideos, if he wants.

[reven]

wouldn't it be better to include this ability to myvideos?

no, its to big of a task to add to my vids, it should be handled by itself, however it would be nice to easily launch into cutting mode, and then exit and return back to my videos (calling a plugin from another plugin and return to the originating plugin, but sub would have to add support for this).

i was just going to wait for sub to add chapter points (like xbmc handles these) and then take those chapter points and cut them using videoredo or something, but i have no idea when sub would add chapter points, if ever. it would be a nice feature to add, i would use it from time to time.

just how fast can you get this to work, and can you get a image from an mpeg2 file? (i had trouble with mpeg2 files, and generating thumbnails, if you can get a frame from that i would love to see the code that does that so i can add support for generating thumbnails for mpeg2 files).

[dottore]

the code can handle every file-type except mpeg2-files. i've tried with gbpvr-recordings and it didn't work. strange.....

seems, that you use the same code for your thumbnails....

[reven]

i use the directx library, and for some reason it doesnt like mpeg2 files.

[dottore]

that's annoying! mediaplayer can play the mpeg2-files, so why doesn't directx like them? i'm searching the web....

[reven]

its not directx exactly, just the method to grab a frame via directx. i cant remember the code exactly, or the exact reason why, i gave up, wasnt that big of an issue for me, most of my vids are xvid/divx and it worked fine for them so i just moved on.

[dottore]

mplayer can save mpeg2-files as png. it should be possible to select single frames....maybe this could be an option. of course people using this must download mplayer....i'll take a look at the licensing.

[dottore]

mplayer is gnu license. i managed it to save png-files with this command: mplayer filename -ss 55 -af volume:-200 -vo png which means, that it starts at 55 seconds with muted sound and saves every frame as png. the problem is, it doesn't stop :-)

searching again....

[dottore]

this does it: mplayer filename -ss 55 -frames 2 -af volume:-200 -vo png
means, that mplayer plays 2 frames starting from second 55 and dumps them into png. with -frames 2 it generates one png-file, with -frames 1 nothing.

this is useful for you reven, you can make thumbnails. i don't know, if it's fast enough for me...i'll try!

[jorm]

I was planning on doing this plugin too. I have a status bar that I can color to indicate commercials. collin had some code that works with mpeg 2 that he wrote I was trying to get a cli for it. but he got busy. i think it would be very useful.