ASF to MPG -- Should I edit out the commercials FIRST??

[LisaB]

I have an ASF file with commercials in it, which I want to convert to MPG without commercials.

I opened it in VirtualDub 1.3c, edited out the commercials (always cutting on key frames), chose "direct stream copy" for both audio and video, then saved as AVI. The resulting AVI seemed fine, but when I encoded to MPG using TMPGEnc, the resulting MPG had audio synch issues.

However, when I directly converted the ASF to MPG using TMPGEnc, there was no problem with audio synch! What is going on here! Doing it this way takes longer (due to encodeing commercials), and now I have to figure out how to edit commercials out of an MPG. It was so easy in VirtualDub...but I don't think I can edit MPG in VirtualDub.

Can someone tell me the best way to do this?

[hustbaer]

you could try the "cut edit" functionality of tmpgenc.
it's in the source-range dialog.

or, if you have enough temp-space, decode the asf or whatever to uncompressed avi (or huffyuf) using virtualdub, edit the uncompressed file, and then encode the edited file using tmpgenc.
that SHOULD work as long as there is no bug in virtual dub.

at last, you can always cut the final mpeg, and then re-join the parts.
all possible with tmpgenc.
just make sure you can cut on I frame bounds.

bye,
--hustbaer