Lossless editing of DVD content

[2Bdecided]

I have read, followed, and used some of the excellent guides on this site. However, what I want to do now doesn't seem to be covered...

I'm trying to take clips (short sections) from various DVDs, some of which I want to losslessly copy onto another DVD, and others I want to edit, or cross fade/wipe, with as little loss as possible.

The problems I've faced are...

1. I'm using Decrypter for demuxing. The demuxed m2v from a DVD doesn't appear to be in standard MPEG-2 format. I say this because some programmes accept it fine, while others (e.g. Vegas, WiMP etc) don't. What's the issue here? Where can I read about the differences between various types of (apparently) MPEG streams, and how can I convert this stream (losslessly) into a format that all MPEG compatible programmes will accept?

2. The editing packages I've found appear to re-encode the content. The MPEG cut feature in TMPG appears to cut sections losslessly (it's painful to edit something using this, but it seems to work) but I can't make it edit MPEG video and AC-3 audio together, in sync. How do people do this? All I want to do is _edit_ (i.e. cut-paste-copy) - it's fine to edit on audio frame boundaries and/or video I-frames only. How?

I know I've got a lot to learn. The problem is that most of the information out there is (obviously) about compressing movies, whereas in this case I don't want to reduce the quality at all.

Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers,
David.

[Mug Funky]

chopping the audio looks to be a problem - you could do it in some programs, but probably not at the same time as doing the video.

programs like chopperXP and a couple others will losslessly cut mpeg-2.

what would be ideal is an NLE app that treats mpeg-2 as it would DV or MJPEG.

there is probably something like this out there, as more and more camcorders are using mpeg-2 to record on instead of DV.