Does virtual dub do the same thing as MPEG-VCR?

[fsuorange]

Hello,

I want to cut out commercials of my video and would like to know if virtuall dub will do allow me to do this without any encoding and loss of quality. will it just shrink the file size like womble does?

Also I noticed that it saves the result as an avi while womble saves it as a mpg. Which is better in terms of quality? Thanks

[Tommyknocker]

When using Virtual Dub, you may want to experiment with small samples of videond use different codecs to see which gives you the quality you want.

The gurus here like the DivX, Huffuv, and DV codecs as far as AVI formats are concerned, and Virtual Dub can save its edited video in all three. MPEG-2 also has a good reputation, although you really have to be skilled at editing it, as it does not like being edited. Ulead Video Studio can tame it, and it has a trial version you can test as well.

So as far as quality is concerned, try a few encodes for yourself, and see what works for you. If you like an AVI format video, but want to encode to MPEG, use Virtual Dub, and frameserve to TMPGEnc to convert to MPEG.

[fsuorange]

but does the virtual dub just cut comercials and save the file like womble or does it re-encode the whole thing?

[mmasw]

yes...with VDub if you are editing most AVI type files you can chop out unwanted video without re-encodong as long as 'Direct Stream Copy' is selected in both video and audio.

You will end up with a number of avi's though (cut out 4 commercials...results in 5 avi's...etc) so you'll have to rejoin

For that, several joiners are available including the append function in VDub. But using that can result in some audio sync issues.

I've founf Boilsoft's multi-purpose joiner to be a good one....it's not free though.