Looking for a simple, no-BS video splitter (and joiner)

[mike503]

Mainly all divx and xvid files, I have a lot I want to split certain parts out (view it, click on "set point" as many times as needed, and then click "split")

I've had a couple in the past that were almost ideal, but the output was always slightly off, not exactly where I put it. Also it was a bit hard to get exactly to where I wanted to in the file.

I've purchased a handful of random shareware type programs and I've been mainly let down. I have a lot of video files to split up, and a little bit of merging; splitting is the bigger headache/higher priority right now.

Sadly video editing software is one thing that Google is filled with crap - lots of people have made crappy products and resell them under 100 different names. So hopefully some people on the forum can give personal suggestions so I can stop having to install 500 trial programs looking for a decent one...

[aedipuss]

divx and xvid are long gop video. the only accurate way to split is on an I-frame and they are few and far between. so it's not going to happen, there are too many b and p frames that are nothing but references to changes from an I frame.

[mike503]

alright, well what would be a good interim step then?

is there a tool that will batch convert to mpeg1 or mpeg2 or something clean first?

i just tried a couple split utils out of the "tools" section. audio is off and one doesn't actually split into multiple files. just crop it into a single file. weird.

i could use mencoder or ffmpeg or anything else, i'd prefer if i could run it on linux command line for mass conversions. i need to figure out a good command line to say "copy the same bitrate, same aspect, same everything just change codec"

[aedipuss]

mpeg isn't any better, an editor friendly format would be more like DVavi.

the best solution would be to have and edit the original video not someone's already encoded divx or xvid.

[mike503]

mpeg isn't any better, an editor friendly format would be more like DVavi.

the best solution would be to have and edit the original video not someone's already encoded divx or xvid.

well i don't really have that option at this point.

according to the terms thing that pops up, it sounds like I frames are what is needed to make splitting easier, and mpeg1/mpeg2 both have them available in a reusable fashion...

is that incorrect?

i have disk space to spare, i don't think i have enough though to do mass conversions to raw DV AVI; but wouldn't mpeg1 or mpeg2 be good enough and then i can go back to those and do the splitting and such?

[aedipuss]

dvd type mpeg-2 would be better than divx for editing but not by a whole lot. or find an editor that works with the I-frames in the xvids. can't help there i don't know of one. but you will have to sacrifice exact positioning for working results no matter which way you go.

[mike503]

well in theory if i can view it and listen to it, something's gotta be able to recapture it back to a file... and i am sure there are some options other than raw DV...

i am trying mpeg1 and mpeg2 right now. still haven't found a good direct-copy option, messing around with trying to match them as good as possible to the original

[olyteddy]

Some of the latest VirtualDub builds will do frame accurate cuts by rendering only the partial GOP. ('Smart Rendering')

[mgh]

so will avidemux

[aedipuss]

avidemux is not frame accurate.