Need help understanding scenecut threshold

[rebkell]

I'm capturing h264 through the new hauppauge hd-pvr and now I want to edit out the commercials. What I've started doing is re-encoding the captured .ts file with x264 and using min-keyint 1 as one of my parameters.

I'm having problems getting IDR frames where I need them though, the fade to blacks and fade from black seem to happen rather frequently during the commercial breaks and therefore I never seem to get an IDR frame where I would like in the encoded stream.

Is there an avisynth filter or tool of some kind that I could use to view the threshold of the encode so that I could see what x264 is seeing so that I might better tweak the scenecut parameter for my commercial editing?

I'm really just looking for ideas or suggestions on the subject.

[Dark Shikari]

Scenecut may not necessarily trigger on a fade at all; in fact, encoding-wise, its optimal for it not to, since the fade is best coded as a series of B-frames with weighted prediction. There's no particular "point" along the fade at which scenecut is likely to trigger.