Repairing the timeline of an MPEG

[erik]

Some people are reporting problems with broken timelines in mpeg files.
I put together a small utility called retime to repair a broken timeline.
One of the utilities that creates a broken timeline is comclean, that explains my interrest....

You can download retime.zip from the url mentioned below

[Clanky]

Whats the symptoms of a broken timeline?

[erik]

Some editors do not allow you to edit a file with broken timeline.
Some mpeg players will hangup, stutter or crash at a break in the timeline

[Clanky]

I sometimes have a problem rw on my MVP, it will ff instead. Dont know if this is the cause..

[erik]

Unedited MPEG recordings normally don't have a broken timeline.
The output of comclean has a broken timeline at the location of the removed commercials
Any relation you found?

[funkybro_uk]

Hi

I frequently suffer from broken timelines in MPEG files (due to poor DVB-T reception). This usually manifests itself in lipsync problems upon playback, and skipping (on the MVP) to be inaccurate (skipping backward sometimes goes forward, skipping forward 2 minutes sometimes goes forward 30!).

I can tolerate the occasional pixellation/breakup etc, but the lipsync problem in particular is highly irritating.

Is Retime likely to fix this? If so, what's the best way to get this utility to run automatically after recording?

Thanks
funkybro

[erik]

I don't know if bbdemux is able to demux DVB-T recordings. If it can then retime may be a solution, just try it and you will know.
You should run it from postprocessing.bat

[kayleigh]

I had a couple of recordings that had messed up video streams (recordings soon after reboots - I suspect the HD was still chattering). The recordings would stutter and the top and bottom fields were out of sync. I ran them through ffmpeg and they were 100% repaired. It may help with the broken timeline issues, too. There's a Windows port available on www.videohelp.com.

[ggee]

This is great. All of my files that were recorded from my capture card had the time stamps all messed up. Not sure what is causing all of them to get messed up. Anyway, I ran it through your retime and it fixed it perfectly. So, how can I add this to my PostProcessing.bat to make it work? Can I just add the following?

retime %1 %1
comskip %1
rectracker %1 > rectracker.log
rem recycler.exe

Or can I not do the same filename as input and output?

Also, please add this tool to the wiki. This is too great to get lost in postings.

Thanks,
Greg

[wtg]

Another option is to use mencoder. I like it a bit better than retime because it's faster and starts writing the new mpg immediately, meaning you can start watching it right away instead of waiting for the file to be remux'd as retime requires.

You might want to give it a whirl:

mencoder -of mpeg -ovc copy -oac copy input.mpg -o output.mpg