Power VCR II -> Edit (cut etc) -> XviD

[antzen]

Hi,

Atm I'm using Power VCR II to capture from my "Hercules SmartTV Stereo". I capture in "PAL DVD":
- Video: 25.000 fps progressive, 720x576x32, MPEG-2
- Audio: 48 000 Hz; Stereo, MPEG Layer 2

As I record from TV I'd like to edit out commercials etc. and then repack these recordings to a small convenient format, like XviD/MP3.

This sounds simple enough, but there's no end to the problems.

To begin with I've no idea about all the nice tools for this purpose, but I've tried these:
- The built-in merge tool in Power VCR II (works fine when the .plt files exists, which they don't anymore)
- TMPGEnc (doesn't keep audio/video sync when merging)
- Adobe Premiere 6.5 (crashes halfway through encoding) I think this is related to the problem I have with mp3 (does ctmp3.acm say something to you? Ah, well.. I'd rather not use Premiere since it insists on repacking the whole capture -> 3-4 hrs wasted time.
- Sonic Foundry Vegas 4.0d (crashes when trying to encode audio other than PCM uncompressed audio, see my other post here: https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183226) I think I've found at least some information about this ant it seems that it's the ctmp3.acm codec that's the bad boy here... Regardless of this, Vegas still consumes 3-4 hrs with a simple edit of the file (to cut out commercials) which is completly unacceptable...
- VirtualDub 1.5.6 (stable) (doesn't encode with audio, stops encoding after 23000+ frames) (I've used this topic: http://virtualdub.everwicked.com/index.php?act=ST&f=15&t=861 and tried the suggestions there)
- VirtualDub-MPEG2 1.5.4 (same as with VirtualDub 1.5.6)
- I've also tried to extract the audio and encode it "externally" from VirtualDub, and then tried to merge them with "Audio WAV file/Direct Stream Copy", but then again the audio/video sync problem.

What I need:
- A tool for quick edit (cut/merge) of MPEG2 files captured with Virtual VCR II. Perhaps there exists a edit tool which can "direct stream copy"?
- A working set of codecs for VirtualDub. I have LAME 3.92 + LameACM 0.0.9.0.

Also note: In this particular case I've 2 mpg files of the recording from Power VCR II, but I've read this topic https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183085 and corrected this "problem" for future captures..

Thanks for the help you might provide
/antz

Edited in blue

[antzen]

anyone?