Free alternative for Videoredo or Womble

[David]

Well, I already have mencoder in my gbpvr directory, so I tried the edl file. I tested on a partial episode of "I Love Lucy", and the commercials were cut right out, and the file played on my DSM-320 with one minor hitch. A couple of seconds after the second commercial break that was a second of significant numbers of mpeg compression block artifacts. The file continued to play without any further problems.

I'll be testing again on some more old sitcoms which come in handy 30 minute episodes.

[erik]

David,

Mencoder does generate a non standard mpeg file, could be a problem.
I am not sure which is best, suggest you try which does the job (does not take much time) for you and report back to the forum.
Actually my networked media player has the same problem so there is some incentive for me to do al this work
I did not try them myself, will do this weekend.

[-stattik-]

Mencoder has another option that may be of use.

-hr-edl-seek

"This allows MEncoder to cut and non-keyframe boundries. Obviously, _only_
if you re-encode the entire video. It does still work with -ovc copy, but
not gracefully."


mencoder capture.avi -ovc lavc -edl cuts.edl -hr-edl-seek

In my testing with -hr-edl-seek, the cuts were very clean but for some reason after the first cut, the audio dropped out and never returned.

[David]

I recorded a full episode of MASH with more obvious problems. I had the video freeze up for 2-3 seconds. Also some occasional artifacts typically after a commerical cut.

I have found and installed Cuttermaran, tweaked my parallelprocessing.bat file and will post back shortly with the results.

[David]

Well, I've had a few mis-starts. Forgot to ask comskip to generate the .cpf file. Forgot the %1 when calling comclean2.bat. Got that all squared away, but cuttermaran is not working. It is not producing _clean files.

I've attached a log file of output from comclean2.bat.

[erik]

The comclean2.bat renames the original mpeg to *_original and the clean file to the original name. Therefore there is no _clean file at the end.
Look at the last couple of lines in the log where the renaming takes place.

[David]

Yes, but the process breaks down at the cuttermaran step, since the*_clean files are not generated. I reviewed the process for 3 shows after I got the command lines right. I can post some sample .cpf files. I downloaded cuttermaran v.1.65.

[erik]

May I recommend to try first the retime utility, this avoids the complexity of cuttermaran. So take the output of comclean and run it through retime.
Which comskip version did you use?
The first version that supported cuttermaran had a nasty bug causing cuttermaran not to generate output under certain conditions, please use the newest comskip version 0.77 build 77
If you post the .cpf file I will be able to tell if you use the old (read buggy) version

[David]

I've been downloading new versions as you have announced them all this last week in anticipation of playing with them this weekend. I gave up figuring out which was which and downloaded a fresh copy of the latest yesterday morning. It should all be very current. I'll re-download this morning and make sure. It would be helpful if you added the build number to your file names.

I'll go ahead and re-anable my bat file commands for mpgtx and add the retime utility in to see how that works. I'll report back with my results.

Thanks,