Best tool for joining elementary video streams together?

[DRP]

What's the best tool for joining elementary MPEG-2 video streams together?

ie. files with extension M2V which contain no audio streams at all. TMPGEnc won't accept them as input in it's Merge & Cut function.

Thanks.

[Tommyknocker]

Have you tried AviSynth or Video Studio?

[spectroelectro]

AviSynth cannot and will not deal directly with MPEG-2 video streams without lengthy re-encoding. Therefore it's not an option for doing MPEG-2 editing unless you have 10 to 20 hours to spare to let AviSynth open the MPEG-2 files, convert 'em to AVIs, do the edits on the AVIs, then re-encode into MPEG-2s.
Only a handful of apps allow direct editing of MPEG-2 streams without massively time-consuming re-encoding:

TMPGenc --- useful only for additive edits. Cut edits require hugely time-consuming re-encodes. It works well for additive edits, though, and I use it for this purpose all the time. WARNING: Only works if the MPEG-2 streams you intend to edit together are absolutely identical, viz., produced by the same MPEG-2 encoder with the same settings. You *cannot* (for example) additively edit together an MPEG-2 stream encoded by, say, MainConcept and one encoded by TMPGenc.

M2EditPro -- Expensive but works very very well. One important caveat: It massively increases the size of the output MPEG-2 stream after the edit because of transcoding. Size roughly doubles. However, this is not much of an issue if you use ReJig, since M2Edit Pro doesn't introduce any noticeable video artifacts. You can do just about anything with M2Edit Pro: additive edits, splices, cut edits, you name it. Very fast. Combined with ReJig, an excellent tool for direclty editing MPEG-2 streams.

Womble MPEG VCR -- Inexpensive and works incredibly fast. This may be the perfect MPEG-2 editing tool. Not quite as many editing features as M2 Edit Pro, but Womble does *not* change the size of the edited video, nor does it introduce noticeable video artifacts (provided you check the box under OPTIONS that says QUALITY instead of speed).

Adobe Premiere 6.5 -- Not recommended, since you must re-encode everything with the integrated Mainconcept encoder. Depending on the edits, it can take many hours to output a simple 15-minute video using Premiere. However, the integrated Mainconcept encoder is superb, nearly as good as TMPGenc or CCE.

[Tommyknocker]

AviSynth cannot and will not deal directly with MPEG-2 video streams without lengthy re-encoding. Therefore it's not an option for doing MPEG-2 editing unless you have 10 to 20 hours to spare to let AviSynth open the MPEG-2 files, convert 'em to AVIs, do the edits on the AVIs, then re-encode into MPEG-2s.
Only a handful of apps allow direct editing of MPEG-2 streams without massively time-consuming re-encoding:

Beautiful sentence structure and very good spelling. Other than that pure speculation. I just wrote this script with AviSynth 2.5 and loaded it into TMPGEnc Plus, aand it ran perfectly. I do not know why Spectroelectro wants to deal with AVIs here when you load the AVS script directly into TMPGEmc Plus. Anyway:

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AVSGEN\bin\MPEG2DEC.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AVSGEN\bin\MPEGDecoder.dll")
MPEGSource("H:\test2.m2v",-2)+MPEGSource("H:\test1.m2v",-2)

Of course, you can also edit out the frames you do not want by entering them in the script as well. Hope this helps.

[DRP]

Okay, thanks for the tips. To be honest I would rather stab myself in the eye with a burnt stick than learn to use the impossibly complicated AVIsynth. Of the others that were suggested, I have Womble installed, so I'll give that a go.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Milo]

Womble apps are the way to go to cut/merge mpeg2 video and/or audio files.

Forget Avisynth for cuting/merging, since it doesn't allow for direct mpeg2 editing. (i.e. what takes 5 min with Womble without quality degradation, will take 5 hours with Avisynth + mpeg2 encoder with quality degradation)

[DRP]

To be honest, I've tried every single joining type tool on this website now (plus a couple of others that aren't here which I had already) to join these Bruce Springsteen videos together and the only thing that is working correctly is the Merge function in DVtool.

I am using DVtool to do the join of the M2V files and then doing the multiplexing in Womble. So far, this seems to be working.