Add chapters to MPEG4 MOV without reencoding

[Jonya]

I'm recording some games and practice sessions to help players improve their skills, and I'd like to edit out downtime and add chapter marks, preferably without re-encoding. The problem is, that there are a LOT of edits to be made, as the downtime between practice serves really adds up.

I have MPEG4 video in MOV format, and MP4Cam2AVI will quickly convert that to AVI. What software can I use to conveniently cut dead segments and add chapter marks? If I don't have to re-encode, that's even better.

Thanks!

[b66pak]

make a chapter list like this:


CHAPTER01=00:00:00.000
CHAPTER01NAME=Intro
CHAPTER02=00:02:30.000
CHAPTER02NAME=Baby prepares to rock
CHAPTER03=00:02:42.300
CHAPTER03NAME=Baby rocks the house


and save it like chapters.txt

get the last mkvtoolnix for windows from here:

http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/win32/mkvtoolnix-unicode-3.1.0.7z

run mmg.exe and add the .mov in the input tab and chapters.txt in the global tab and mux to .mkv...
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[Jonya]

Thanks, I haven't seen mkvtoolnix before. Indeed it does add chapters without re-encoding, but I'd also like to cut out dead space between chapters. More than 75% of my video is dead space and this adds up to a lot of gigabytes.

Is there a way to cut the video while adding chapters, without re-encoding?

[b66pak]

then go with MP4Cam2AVI and cut the resulting .avi with VirtualDub...finally make chapters and remux the final .avi to .mkv...
_

[Jonya]

Thanks, that's the best I had come up with as well. I looked into the mkvmerge system and figured out the following:

mkvmerge -o file --chapters x --split timecodes:[...] FILE.MOV
mkvmerge -o merged.mkv f-002.mkv +f-004.mkv

This works. I think it works well enough for me, although the chapter timing is slightly off afterwords. I'll just have to see if it gets worse once I have 50 chapters in a video.

Thanks b66pak.