mpg to dvd: tools/process for cutting commercials, making chapters

[knathraak]

I'm trying to make a DVD of shows I've recorded from television. I'd like to cut out the commercials and have the places where the commercials removed become chapter marks in the final dvd.

I've experimented with Avidemux and I'ts good at cutting out sections and reencoding, but that doesn't help me with the chapter marks.

I'm sure other people have people have figured out a process for doing this. Should I be using something *instead* of avidemux? Or perhaps something in addition to it? Any suggestions for tools and process would be appreciated.

[oldcpu]

I'm trying to make a DVD of shows I've recorded from television. I'd like to cut out the commercials and have the places where the commercials removed become chapter marks in the final dvd.

I can't help with the chapter marks, but with respect to the removal of commercials, ... if your movie file is in mpeg format, I find dvbcut is excellent for removing clips:
http://dvbcut.sourceforge.net/

[knathraak]

I can't help with the chapter marks, but with respect to the removal of commercials, ... if your movie file is in mpeg format, I find dvbcut is excellent for removing clips:
http://dvbcut.sourceforge.net/

Well, like I mentioned above, avidemux is good at cutting. I'm looking for a process, i.e., tools to use *with* or *instead of* avidemux that will result in either a number of mpg files that can become chapters or a single mpg file with a list of timecodes that can be used for chapter marks.

So I'm looking for advice from anyone who is already doing this sort of thing along the lines of "first I use this tool, then I use this tool, and export this file, yada yada..."

Thanks for the tip about dvbcut. I'll check it out and see what features it has.

[pragen]

knathraak,

I don't know of any automated way to determine your chapter marks, which I think is what you wanted.

I would also like to know an automated way, but here is how I do it manually for you or others that might be interested:

Inserting chapter marks is a function of the authoring program you use. I also use Avidemux for basic editing (cutting out sections). It works great. I am currently using DVDStyler for authoring. Its simple but gets the job done.

In Avidemux, for a chapter point, place video at that point and manually copy the time from the time box at the bottom of the Avidemux window. Repeat for all your chapters. (Copy and paste to a text file.)

Using DVDStyler, insert the video(s) into the DVDStyler project. (DVDStyler has a good users manual on its web site. Its not hard to use, but not always 100% intuitive at first)

To enter chapter times right click on the video file icon at the bottom (that you added), select properties, and enter your chapter times on the Chapters line. It has default times there you can use to determine the format. These chapter points are now "hidden" chapter points for use with the advance (?) button on a remote.

You can now optionally create menu items to jump to the start of chapters. Using the buttons functionallity, add buttons to the menu (1 for each chapter). Right click on the buttons, select properties, and on the Action/Jump to area set the title and chapter number to jump to, for each button. (You'll also want to change the button text, menu background, etc)

When the rest of the menu is complete, click File Burn DVD and you can create files structure, or an ISO image, or if your lucky, burn straight to DVD. I usually create an ISO and then use K3B to burn the image.

pragen

[knathraak]

Pragen, thanks for the tips!

I've never used DVDStyler--I'll give it a try.

It would be really great if Avidemux or some other nonlinear editing tool would make a list of timecodes in each place the video had been cut & rejoined that could be saved to a text file and used by your DVD Authoring program.

There's a tool that I used to use to extract shows from my Tivo (I've since changed to Myth for archiving) called TyTool. Although it was pretty rough, it did give you the ability to nonlinearly create a "cutlist" for commercials to be removed and then that cutlist would be used to automatically generate chapter marks. Interestingly his tool actually used DVDAuthor with cygwin.

Any way, at least this is a process, which is more than I had before. I'll try it out!

[DaveQB]

I do the same as above, accept i use QDVDauthor instead of DVDStyler. I found QDVDauther much easier to use the DVDStyler. But to each their own.

And of course I use k3b for burning. Add in some effects with Kino at the start of the whole process and you can make some pretty nice looking DVD's. Well I can

[knathraak]

Okay, thanks! I'll give QDVDAuthor a try! It is conveniently available in the Ubuntu package repositories (hate it when I have to download & compile from source).

[DaveQB]

(hate it when I have to download & compile from source).

I hear ya on that one.

[uth]

I use gopchop to cut out commercials. I save each segment to a separate MPG, that way they become my "chapters" on the DVD.

[knathraak]

I use gopchop

Will gopchop let me specify a bunch of cut marks, and then do all the chopping in a batch?

[uth]

I use gopchop

Will gopchop let me specify a bunch of cut marks, and then do all the chopping in a batch?

You can do multiple cuts, and it will dump them to a single mpeg file. The problem I ran into was that after processing it with mencoder, the a/v goes out of sync after the first cut and gets worse with each cut.


For batch processing, I use the "edl" feature of mencoder. If you do mplayer -edlout myfile.edl video.mpg, then every place you want to make a cut, press the 'i' key. When you're done, your myfile.edl will contain the time (in seconds and fractional seconds) of each cut.

I've found that you have to edit this file to make it useful though, as it only contains the cut points

So if your myfile.edl looks like this:

500.23 502.5 0
1213.22 1215.64 0
1623.54 1625.23 0
2521.23 2523.21 0

Lets say the 500-502 mark is the point the show starts, you want to dump everything before. The 1213 mark is the first commercial, and 1623 is where the commercials end, and 2521 is the end of the show, then you want to write your edl like this:

0.0 500.23 0
500.23 1213.22 1
1213.22 1623.5 0
1623.5 2521.23 1
2521.23 1000000.0 0

Each line above has three numbers the first two are "from" and "to", and the third is a 1 (meaning show) or a 0 (meaning cut). On the last line, I use a high number that will exceed the end of the clip to indicate end of show.

If you run that through mencoder with -edl mynewfile.edl, then the resulting video will have your cuts (hopefully in the right place :P )