Please help a noob edit commercials from Mpeg-2 files. :)

[kidfob]

Ok, so here's the situation. I got my Athlon 1700 w/ 512mb ram, and lotsa hd space. Time to start archiving TV shows, no? I'm using the Happaguage WinTV PVR. I'm a busy man, so I use the WinTV scheduler to record the shows I want. It uses Windows Scheduler to launch WinTV 2000 and start recording. Before I do this, I had to configure the capture settings. I go to MPEG and choose what flavor I want. There's normal MPEG1 VCD, MPEG2 2bit/sec, 4bit/sec, 6,8, & 12 bits/sec. The MPEG2's for 4bit and up are available in VBR or CBR. I chose 4bit/sec @ variable bitrate for better file size/quality ratio. I get about 8megs per minute with this setup, so it's all good.

I cap the show and am now ready to edit out comercials. Here is where my week of dire FRUSTRATION comes in...

I tried TMPGenc, since it is the official MPEG-2 editor of the NBA and geeks alike. This doesn't work well at all. I open Mpeg tools, merge/cut, add the file I want, and then edit it by choosing the proper start and end point. When I click on Run, I get an "Invalid MPEG (video) Stream" error. WTF? Noooo!

I try this several times, w/ several different flavors of MPEG-2. no go.

I say to hell w/ it and then proceed to try my hand at FlaskMpeg. I love the interface. Very intuitive. If only you could save edit points...

Anyway, I choose bbMpeg as the output, deinterlace w/ blending, width/height at around 700x300 (not exact here, just off the head) crop the image, and click Flask it. I run the jobs in batch mode. Everything seems to be going well. But...... soon I get "FlaskMpeg has caused an illegal operation in FlaskMpeg.exe". Damn!!! This happens to me no matter what I do in FlaskMpeg or what flavor of MPEG-2 i use, which is funny since I was able to do this succesfully in a test run last week. I edited comercials from an mpeg-2 file w/ flask and converted to divx w/ Vidomi. Worked like a charm! Now... nuthin'!

My hypotheses:
I did a LOT of sleuthing on google, trying to figure out why the hell MY life has to suck. Is cutting commercials from my shows too much to ask?

I suspect that the audio portion of my Mpeg encoding could be causing the problem. Flask stays afloat a lot longer when I turn off audio processing. Also, someone on the Flask Forum told a person trying to rip DVD w/ it to set the audio codec to a higher priority when he was having crashes.

I also suspect that my mpeg tv grabs could just suck. Perhaps they are corrupted. Maybe wintv's way of capping is sloppy. However, I need to use it since it has that nifty scheduler. When trying to open the mpegs in Virtual Dub, i have to make sure advanced open options are checked and tell it to all "partial" mpegs. (This is an Mpeg-1 test by the way. Virtual Dub hates MPEG-2's).

Now some of you may tell me that I should just stick w/ mpeg-1. I can't. The Mpeg-1 caps in WinTV are TERRIBLE. The audio is out of synch, it has a bizarre aspect ratio, crappy video and the resolutiong is crap. So that's not an option. I found that this poor quality was alleviated by usting mpeg-2 at 4bit/sec. The only problem is I can't edit.

I know I've been long winded, and thank those who took the time to read my stillborn post. I was just trying to be as descriptive as possible in order to help you help me. All help/comments are appreciated. Also, feel free to get at me via email: tekknomancer@hotmail.com. Thanks for listening guys.

[furwatup]

try tmpeg once again, but this time click on the settings go to the advanced tab and go to source range, then you can just pick your in and out points and it seems to work, i just tryed a little sample and it worked just fine

i dont know if this is what this particular function is for but it seems to get the job done

hope this helps and doesnt screw things up considering im not an expert on tmpeg yet

[oberkfell]

Does the source range allow you to make more than one edit and cut? Don't you have to save each edit as a seperate file or does this allow you to join them all together.

I would also like to also know how to load an MPEG2 file into TMPGenc as I capture in MPEG2 but have been converting to AVI w/DIVX 4.12 compression then loading it into TMPGenc. Which to me seems backasswards.

I know I can use DVD2AVI, but it still gives me an error when I want to edit the file in MPEG tools.

[furwatup]

as far as the little test i did it did i just used a music video, i scanned in hit set start frame scanned a little more hit set end frame and so on a couple of times and it seemed to work just fine

[Roginator]

In prior posts, I've described what I do to edit MPEG-2 files.

But to check on the quality of your capture, get the program PVAStrumento.exe and run that. It'll tell you if there are missing video or audio frames.

[kidfob]

hi furwatup, I tried the source range method. it seemed to work fine before the first round of commercials. When i set the source to start at the frame after the 1st commercials, the resulting mpeg is out of synch. :(

Why must this be so hard? Sound editing is so simple compared to this. thanks for the suggestions guys. as for the people who use mpeg2, how do u cap your mpeg2's? do u use wintv? what bitrate? 2bit/sec? 4, 6, 8?

mpeg ep, lp, or sp? why is flask crashing? thanks.

[oberkfell]

I have been screwing around with the same problem for a few hours. I have found that when TMPGenc comes up and gives me the Microsoft "We are sorry for the inconvenience" we need to close horsecrap. I simply move the message off to the side and continue to merge and cut with no problems. The error box is still there but It will merge/cut MPEG2 files.

[Roginator]

I'm capturing with a hardware Creative VideoBlaster VCR at 8MB/sec (don't ask me how they come up with that number). I think it translates into roughly 15,000kbps. I capture the audio at 384kbps.

You CAN edit out the commercials using programs: DVD2AVI, MPA2WAV, Avisynth, and VirtualDub. If recording from tape or if you have signal drops during capture, you may find PVAStrumento useful as well.