[MPlayer-users] TV Capture and AVI editing - best practices

[Bradley Alexander]

I'm still pretty new to the whole digital video scene, and am looking
for a best practices.

Right now, I am using mplayer and mencoder primarily, because it is just
the best tool out there. Thanks for all you hard work, developers.

Here is my procedure. There are different and possibly better ways to do
this, and thats what I am looking for. Alternatives. For every problem
in Unix, if you ask n admins, you will come up with at least n+1 ways to
do it.

I use vcr to capture the video off of my Hauppage BT848 capture card.
The reason I use this app is because the only alternatives I have found
a) only work with a different card (e.g. dvr2 only works with ATI
All-in-wonder) or b) doesn't have a built-in tuner control. vcr gives me
the ability to record programs remotely by specifying a channel, since
it apparently takes its tuner control code from xawtv.

However, vcr gives me a very large (875MB/hr) DivX ;-) Low-Motion file,
which I then postprocess through a 3-pass mencoder DivX conversion.

The problem I have run into is that in recording from TV, I haven't
found an acceptable way to strip out commercials. I have tried using
avisplit from the transcode package similar to

 avisplit -i Unforgiven.avi -o Unforgiven-cut.avi -c -t \
0:0:1-0:20:17,0:25:22-0:38:35,0:43:38-0:55:15,1:0:03-1:11:17, \
1:15:59-1:24:42,1:29:32-1:43:25,1:49:08-2:02:03,2:07:23-2:15:00

however, the transcode people say that their tools will not work with
videos not made with transcode. I found that in the post-avisplit avi,
two major problems occurred. First, avisplit does a sequential stripping
of the avi. What this means is that after you rip out the first batch of
commercials, the second is not in the location they were originally, so
you are actually removing movie.

The second problem is that the sound gets further and further out of
sync until it disappears altogether. MPlayer starts in with the 

DEMUXER: Too many (2112 in 8388710 bytes) video packets in the buffer!
(maybe you play a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed)?
For .AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with option -ni

messages. This occurs whether you use the original raw avi or one that
has been postprocessed by mencoder.

Any suggestions on how to record/remove commercials from saved .avis?
I'd be willing to change recording apps or whatever it takes.

-- 
--Brad
============================================================================
Bradley M. Alexander                |   storm [at] debian.org
Debian Developer, Security Engineer |   storm [at] tux.org
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