[MPlayer-users] Using mplayer as a MPEG-TS cutter

[Ptitboul Ptitboul]

Dear all,

an increasing number of TV broadcasters use MPEG-TS with a H.264 video
stream, and there is no simple tool for cutting / splitting such streams
under Linux. However, a specificity of MPEG-TS is that, being intended for
broadcast, it carries its own resynchronisation mechanisms and it can be cut
using dd (with any blocksize, but most MPEG-TS stream having packets of 188
bytes this is the preferred blocksize for cutting).

Now the question is how to find the position in the file where we would like
to cut. Since mplayer can efficiently play MPEG-TS with a H.264 video
stream, we could simply like to add to mplayer's status line the current
position in the file, in octets from the beginning of the file. However,
this value is not really meaningful for video format that don't have
resynchronisation capabilities, therefore we may like to display it only
with MPEG-TS and similar formats.
What do you think?

Another useful thing would be to add to mplayer the capability to advance
frame-by-frame, or from an I-frame to the next one.

Thanks,
Ptitboul