Cutting in h.264 transportstreams [Archive]

W3ird_N3rd

30th June 2010, 13:35

For years I've been using ProjectX to cut bits out of DVB recordings and demux them. Nowadays, more and more transportstreams (e.g. something recorded from BBC HD) have h.264 video and ProjectX never got support for that.

I suspect it would be difficult to create support for h.264 in ProjectX (otherwise it would have already been done) so it seems highly unlikely I would be able to pull it off with my pretty very limited hardly existing programming skills.

But it means I'll need another tool. I use Linux so a native tool would be highly preferred. I want to be able to cut out the bit that I want with a preview (so I can see what I'm cutting) and cut out commercials. And it would be nice to be able to load the result in a transcoding application, like avidemux.

Right now I can already load a BBC HD recording in avidemux, but it's not really seekable. Whenever I seek, it seems it has to go through the whole file from the beginning, despite having created an index. So it takes forever..

I hope you can give me some good suggestions for tools to work with h.264 transport streams. :)

mopurist

30th June 2010, 16:47

My system is very convoluted. Its all done from linux, but I do end up using windows via VirtualBox and wine too.

Basically, I start with dgavcindex and virtualdubmod run in windows on Virtualbox to determine cutpoints which I enter into a text file.

I haven't found any native linux app that will help determine frame-accurate cuts for h264. Anyone know of any?

Then a script I wrote (ugly as sin) demuxes, cuts the audio according to the list, writes an avs file, also using the cut list, and feeds the cut video to avs2yuv. Avs2yuv then feeds x264 for reencoding, and finally the script merges the cut audio and reencoded video.

I have all but given up on avidemux. I try it every once in a while to see if things have changed, but I personally have never had any luck with it doing anything beyond the simplest of tasks. Which is truly sad. I do hope it becomes robust at some point (or maybe it's just me).