[MPlayer-users] -ss in DVD broken ?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 12:13:24PM +0100, Fabien Perdu wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hello guys.
> 
> First thank you very much for this wonderful piece of code that
> allows me to use my linux box for video watching.
> 
> Now the real stuff :
> I am using rc3.
> I am trying to use the -ss switch with DVDs.
> I wanted to encode pieces of a DVD separately to be able to burn them
> on separate CDs afterwards (for my own use, of course!)
> so I tried
>  mencoder -dvd 1 -endpos 4000 -o CD1.avi -otheroptions
>  mencoder -dvd 1 -ss 4000 -o CD2.avi -otheroptions
> The big surprise is that the end of CD1.avi does not match at all the
> beginning of CD2.avi
> Then I tried to understand this by playing back the files with mplayer,
> and I discovered that
>  mplayer CD1.avi -ss 1000 -otheroptions and
>  mplayer -dvd 1 -ss 1000 -otheroptions
> do NOT play the same part of the movie !!
> 
> What's more, running mplayer -dvd 1 -ss 1000 -otheroptions,
> the time shown is the status line is not 1000, as well as the time
> shown in the OSD.

OK, -ss does NOT work with NTSC DVD's because of telecine brain damage
confusing the framerate. However, what you want to do is brain damaged
too. Just cutting at an arbitrary time like 4000 seconds will probably
split CD's right during a scene and make watching the movie painful.
(Get up, switch CD's, restart player -- right while someone is
talking! -- bleh!!)

Instead, you should use -chapter. For example, encode the first CD
with -chapter 1-9 and the second with -chapter 10-18 (assuming 18
chapters total). You might tweak the numbers depending on the lengths
and amount of action in the chapters.

Rich