3-5 minutes sample

[Roebi]

Hello,

As a newbie, I have a question:


Is is possible within ffmpegX to run a decoding session only for e.g. the first 3-5 minutes of a movie and have all the authoring/post-processing done? This would help testing our different settings without having to go through a full movie conversion, which takes hours. I am having troubles understanding how to work out aspect ratio conversions when converting a divx to DVD, and there is nothing more annoying than finding out that the image is stretched after an several hours wait. I have read the following guide: https://www.videohelp.com/forum/userguides/174200.php , but still it is not always clear if I am doing everything correctly.

If not, is there a tool that would cut out a few minutes of a movie, in order to make a sample?

Thanks in advance for any help and advice.

Regards

[Case]

Can't you cut a 3-5 min segment out of (a copy of) your source movie? ffmpegX can split avis, or use Explicit.

[Roebi]

Thank you.
Right what I needed.
Now I can test the letterboxing settings on a 1-minute sample.