Why isn't there a "real" video cutter in MeGUI?

[falco2000]

Hello. I was going out for an appointment and I wanted to leave my pc on, doing some conversion work.

I'm using MeGUI.

I had no time to cut the commercials from my DVB-T MPEG recording (MPEG-2+MP2), so I decided to convert at least (to h.264) the whole video stream, thinking that later, come back home, I would have been able to set a cutlist and apply the cuts to my converted movie (and then to the mp2 stream, that I didn't need to re-encode; and as a final step I would have mux the cutted .h264 stream and the .mp2 cutted stream together in a MKV container).

Now, while MeGUI includes an Audio Cutter tool, that reads the .clt cutlists file the MeGUI itself creates (if one wants to save it, and I always do), it doesn't include a "true" Video Cutter, so I hadn't be able to apply the saved cuts (that I prepared after coming back home) to my .h264 video stream file. I've been able to apply them to the .MP2 audio stream only, as usual, with the Audio Cutter.

AFAIK, MeGUI doesn't include a "true" Video Cutter - I was saying - it includes an AviSynth script cutter instead. So I thought to use it to create a modified (cut) video stream to feed the MKV muxer with, togetherr with my cut mp2 audio stream file.
But the MKV muxer doesn't allow an AviSynth script as input video stream (I get an error after the queue starts, if I try to do so). Too bad.

So, at the moment I just need to cut my "movie.h264" video stream file using the .clt cutlist file.

Will I have to do it manually with another program, processing this video stream (muxed inside a whatever container, I suppose), splitting it into parts by copying and pasting each couple of frame numbers that I have for each segment (from the cutlist file generated by MeGui) and rejoin these segments into a new file, or is there some other option that didn't come up into my mind?

And by the way, why is there an Audio Cutter (I'd rather call it Audio Stream Cutter) but not a Video (Stream) Cutter?

Thank to anyone who will give me some hint.

[Hoser Rob]

It's a converter. A very good one. They do not claim it's also a full featured editor. It's free. Whaddya want?

If you want a more full featured editor/converter I'd suggest avidemux, But it doesn't have as many conversion options. It's more biased towards editing.

[falco2000]

Whaddya want?

I (also) want to express a suggestion - born from a problem - to improve the software, since the cutlist function and the Audio Cutter tool are already included in MeGUI, and one should only program a dialogue window that easily controls one more little free command line tool as BeSplit.exe is.

I'd write it myself if I knew the language in which MeGUI is written...

[El Heggunte]

I'd write it myself if I knew the language in which MeGUI is written...

C#

[falco2000]

I'd write it myself if I knew the language in which MeGUI is written...

C#

"If I knew the language", not "If I knew which language"

Anyway, I could mux the h.264 video stream in a MP4 or MKV container and use MP4BOX or MKVTOOLNIX to extract the parts that I need, rejoin them and finally demux the output to get the h.264 video stream again.

Just out of curiosity, isn't there a free tool to directly split the h.264 video stream, to avoid the use of a container and muxing/demuxing?

[_Al_]

You re-encode and cut, that is what videoeditor is for. To have that within Megui would be redundant.

You load your video into videoeditor (VEGAS, Premiere etc., cheap versions for example) and you can go through frameserver to get to Megui if you do not want to use those videoeditor's encoders.

[El Heggunte]

I'd write it myself if I knew the language in which MeGUI is written...

C#

"If I knew the language", not "If I knew which language"

Allright, so be it.
But then I wonder why you choose to say "the language blah-blah-blah" instead of going straight-2-the-point...

Still, I think you really should send the original question to the authors/maintainers of MeGUI themselves.
And none of them cares about the VideoHelp forums, SFAIK.

[hello_hello]

Just out of curiosity, isn't there a free tool to directly split the h.264 video stream, to avoid the use of a container and muxing/demuxing?

Video To Video Converter. There's a couple of ways to do it, but try the commercial remover under the tools menu.

The problem with splitting the encoded video though, is the need to split on keyframes, so you can't always split exactly where you want to.

For the record, MeGUI has a file called "mmg.exe" in it's installation folder, in the mkvmerge sub-folder. You can certainly split with it, but it doesn't have a preview. You may be familiar with it's more commonly used name, MKVMergeGUI. The muxers in MeGUI's tools menu also have a splitting option, but they probably wouldn't be much good for what you want to do, as they only split by file size.

[hello_hello]

You re-encode and cut, that is what videoeditor is for. To have that within Megui would be redundant.

You load your video into videoeditor (VEGAS, Premiere etc., cheap versions for example) and you can go through frameserver to get to Megui if you do not want to use those videoeditor's encoders.

MeGUI can easily cut/edit video while you encode it. The AVS Cutter under it's tools menu makes it nice and easy to specify only the sections of video you wish to encode.

I'd assume as MeGUI is basically a video encoder, cutting without encoding is something it's makers have left to other software.

And by the way, why is there an Audio Cutter (I'd rather call it Audio Stream Cutter) but not a Video (Stream) Cutter?

Thank to anyone who will give me some hint.

Because you can edit the video while encoding, which means you need to be able to cut the audio to match. It's a good thing MeGUI doesn't force you to re-encode the audio in order to cut it.

You wouldn't be able to use AVISynth to cut existing video as it's a frame server. It just frame serves the video uncompressed to be re-encoded.

[falco2000]

Ok, thank you to everybody. But I miss that feature. What about the case in which we have a movie and we want to re-encode the audio stream only? We wouldn't be able to do that with MeGUI, as far as I understand, would we?

[_Al_]

-drop avisynth script onto audio input only

[falco2000]

-drop avisynth script onto audio input only

Could you please explain that a little more explicitly? I understand that you probably mean to open the .avs file as an audio track (for which there's a "Cuts" field for the cutlist file) but what next? I should encode it in an audio stream file, and that doesn't make sense to me........

[_Al_]

I'm lost at what you want to exactly achieve. But it works like this:

First, to cut out parts of video and audio is Avisynth function, you can do it just before loading Megui:

Trim(0,1000) ++ Trim(2000,3000) ++ Trim(4000,5000) ++ Trim(6000,7000)

Megui provides nice video preview and updates script accordingly, so you can trim avisynth script after loading it into Megui or after you let Megui to create your avs script, Megui can cut parts you want to keep using avs cutter (I think, maybe it asks for parts you do not want, not sure), Megui just rewrites avs script.

If you want to encode video and audio you press auto-encode to queue it for encoding
If you want audio only , m4a or ac3 , (depends what you set) you can manually delete lines you do not want to process in your queue, select line delete, no , start

If you drop your input on audio input only you press Queue for that input , it will queue audio only, in mp4 container though in m4a case , AC3 should be fine

[hello_hello]

Ok, thank you to everybody. But I miss that feature. What about the case in which we have a movie and we want to re-encode the audio stream only? We wouldn't be able to do that with MeGUI, as far as I understand, would we?

The OneClick encoder has an option to only copy the video. I've not used it myself as generally it's something you can do manually fairly easily.

For example you can load a video file directly into the audio section for encoding and simply encode the audio that way. I haven't tried every file format under the sun, but it should work with just about anything as MeGUI can open files via DirectShow if all else fails.
Alternatively you can open lots of different file types with MKVMergeGUI and remux them as MKVs. From there you can use MKVCleaver to extract the audio stream and encode it. Or you could open the file for indexing as you normally would and encode the audio once MeGUI has extracted it, in which case you wouldn't need to create a script. If it's a file type MeGUI can't encode directly, I think it'll create a script to encode both the video and audio, in which case you'd once again just add the audio encoding job to the queue.

However you go about it, once the audio is re-encoded it's just a matter of opening the original video with MKVMergeGUI, deselecting the original audio stream, adding the new one, and saving it as a new MKV. Or one of MeGUI's muxers under the tools menu will do the same for MKV/MP4/AVI.

[_Al_]

falco2000
Oh I get it now,you want to cut audio without re-encoding and then you need to cut video accordingly . sorry , you have ts file?, how about this,


-create avisynth script with ffmpegsource http://code.google.com/p/ffmpegsource/downloads/detail?name=ffms-2.17.7z&can=2&q= load it into avisynth plugin folder

ffmpegsource2("....path...your.ts", atrack=1, seekmode=1) #or try seekmode=0 if problem while seeking

-load avs into megui , start to cut it using its avs cutter,(no audio cutter) export Save cut files to get .clt, add cuts to script
-encode just video within megui
-start audio cutter, use that .clt, get your audio
-mux it within mkvmerge or megui ,there is mkv muxer too in it

[_Al_]

you might demux your TS (tsmuxer?) to get audio file for that audio cutter , looks like it will not load avs

or

did you try to work with Avidemux to do what you want?