mpeg2 cut/join problem (2004 GOP Odyssey)+ MPEG VCR question

[Edocecrous]

Hello!

This is my first post, and thanks to the 3 day no-post rule, i solved the problem i encountered. Still, i have few things uncleared. So if you have cut/join problems, read on, it might help you out. On the other hand, if you are a video wizard, jump to the end where i list my questions. While i might not sound like a newbie, that's only the result of the fact that i do research on it before get into something new...

-Objective: Capture recorded series from a DVR (UltimateTV), cut out advertisement, make a nice menu and burn a DVD from it.

-Equipment: DVR, Hauppauge PVR 350, WinTV200 for capture, MPEG Video Wizard for edit, TMPGEnc to demux, ffmeggui to transcode MP2->AC3, DVDit Pe to author, and Nero 6 to burn.

-What i did: Captured the stuff in full D1, VBR 8000Mb/s, interlaced, with MP2 256kbs audio (had no choice for pcm or AC3), hardware encoded into a nice big MPEG file. Using MPEG Video Wizard, i cut it into pieces (separate files), than put the pieces together again. (big mistake...)

-Symptoms: DVDit Pe drops an error message during build: Error, GP doesn't contain video. DVDit Pe is limited anyway, so i change to DVDlab 1.4, it stops playback at some join points, and after that often dies out.

-Two programs has problem with the stream, so i check on it with Bitrate Viewer, and see that Video Wizard cut in the midle of GOP-s, and made no attempt to cut/join on I-frames, or at least fix it...

-Solution: I use MPEG-VCR to 'cut out' the bad join points, reauthor the stuff, and voila, it works.

Bad:
835 00:06:56.19 15 IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB No
836 00:06:57.04 15 IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB No
837 00:06:57.19 6 IBBPBB No
838 00:06:57.25 2 IB No
839 00:06:57.27 10 IPBBPBBPBB Yes
840 00:06:58.07 15 IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB No

Fixed:
835 00:06:56.19 15 IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB No
836 00:06:57.04 10 IPBBPBBPBB Yes
837 00:06:57.14 15 IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB No

DVDlab stops at 00:6:57.16, i assumed because it could not find the next I-frame (I-frame jump skips to the beginning somewhere...)
When i cut out the 6 and 2 GOPs, the error was still there, so i assumed that it is in fact at frame 57.16, wich would make it the last P frame in GOP 57.04 If i'm right, there should be a more elegant solution, where we manually fix the pointer to the right address (i assume it's in the GOP header of frame 57.04

My questions:
---------------
--Is there a program to at least view these GOP headers in detail? (In DVDlab i found something similar, but it can't jump to a timecode or frame, and simply exits after a couple 'next page'-es.

--in MPEG-VCR, what does the GOP Trim button do? (actually how to use it...)

[Edocecrous]

bump )