Impossible to get a precise cut in VCD?

[El Bart0]

Hello all, I'm wondering if it's absolutely impossible to cut a VCD in precisely the spot I need to cut it in. I've been capturing TV using my Pinnacle PCTV with WinDVR straight to VCD, and I've been trying to cut out commercials with VCDCutter and TMPGEnc, but both of them cannot seem to cut the MPEG *exactly* where it needs to be cut, which leaves me with the last few frames of a commercial leaked into the show. Being the perfectionist I am, I'm ready to rip my hair out...any suggestions?

[sterno]

This has been discussed a number of times. The basic problem is that MPEG files were never really meant to be "cut" like that. They can only be cut at key frames. The only way to actually get a frame-accurate cut is to reencode.

[El Bart0]

Damn...and reencoding is going to kill the quality, isn't it?

[Nelson37]

Well, not necessarily. To cut accurately you need more keyframes, to add more keyframes without quality loss you need more bitrate, and with more bitrate you can re-encode back to VCD standard with little qualtiy loss compared to real-time VCD capture.

I have gone round-and-round with this issue for a long time, and I keep coming back to MPG-2, 672x448 (cropped), I-frame only, 12Mbit/s, CBR. I then process this same as a DVD rip, with the exception that I run it through VDUB for editing and then frameserve. The advantage over AVI is that I can cap 4 or 5 movies in one day before I run out of space.

You might also try M2 Edit Pro or Womble, M2 is supposed th be the best editor out there, though it did not work for me, YMMV.

[sterno]

That's pretty similar to what I do. If I'm going to VCD I'll usually capture 352x480 or 480x480 at 6Mbit or higher, since I'm usually going from VHS tape I don't gain a whole lot from a higher resolution unless I want to do filtering.