Okay, I lied..another question about the Flexion guide

[Gideon30]

One more question. The guide has a step for multiplexing the streams together, and splitting into multiple parts. Is this really the only way to do this as you can't tell where you are cutting? what if you cut right in the middle of a great action scene.....

[BadAsh]

I have been using this method and it works great (and fast) but you are right, there is no way to know exactly where the cut will be. The creator of bbMPEG is working on a solution but nothing yet (at least that is what Flexion says).

There is another way though. The Flexion guide has you creating a Video Only MPEG Stream file and a MPEG1-Layer2 (MP2) Audio Only file to use in the final merge (mux).

You could skip this whole step by setting the D2V file as your Video Source, the MP2 (or whatever) as your Audio Source and then using the "Source Range" feature in TMPEGEnc. Now there is always a risk of the audio going out of sync this way but it is worth a shot.

By using "Source Range" in TMPEGEnc you can set the Start and End point just the way you want it.

I would recommend setting the Start and End points for the first half, save the Project, change the Start and End Points for the second half and so on (depending on size) saving those Projects as well and then load them up in a Batch and let it go.

I used this method once with an AVI and WAV source. It worked just fine.

The Flexion guide claims that the conversion from WAV to MP2 results in an Audio source that is easier to cut for the final Mux. I don't know if that is true but it would make sense in the case of the Flexion guide since both sources would be a version of MPEG.

Give it a try.

Good Luck!

[Gideon30]

Hmmm. Just curious. Could you take your chances, and see where it cuts, and if you didn't like the location, join the mpeg2 files back together, and cut again with one of the other programs? or is that asking too much?

[BadAsh]

You could do that. I don't know if it is really worth it though.

TMPGEnc has a good interface for cutting existing MPEGs... the only problem is that the resultant MPEG files are not VCD compliant. Supposedly this has been fixed in the i and j versions. Give it a try.

Other than bbMPEG I haven't seen many programs I trust to do MPEG cuts/splits.

If it were me though, I'd follow the Flexion guide and if I just couldn't live with the cut then I'd use the "Source Range" feature in TMPEGEnc like I suggested earlier.