MPEG tools

[Ken Jarstad]

I'm always looking for software tools to examine, manipulate and repair video. And now that I use HDV I have found a very useful tool for MPEG files. It's named Mpg2Cut2.

It seems to be a "Swiss Army knife" for MPEG, especially MPEG-2. There is a lot of information exposed about the files and you can utilize more options than I know what to do with.

This IS a BETA product and some folks report the cutting/splitting facility may have some problems, but I am generally impressed. Definitely worth a look.

Here is the description at Afterdawn:

Mpg2Cut2 Beta Build 7318

Mpg2cut2 is a fault tolerant, GOP level, binary editor for basic cutting of Mpeg2 Program Stream files. It can handle very large files (64bit) captured from Digital Television broadcasts (DTV), including High Definiton (HDTV).

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/video_tools/mpg2cut2.cfm

[RJ Johnston]

Thanks Ken.

You're right about the options. There are plenty.

Since I have VideoRedo Plus, which edits HD material, I'm trying to figure out the advantage -- besides cost -- of using one over the other for editing purposes. In addition to being a GOP editor, Videoredo is also a frame-accurate mpeg editor.

[Ken Jarstad]

Hi Robert. VideoRedo I hear is an excellent editor, but Mpg2Cut2 is an application in Beta. I don't know what diagnostic and tweaking tools VideoRedo has but this freebie has a lot of interesting extras for those of us that need to know how stuff works. I like peaking under the hood but sometimes it takes awhile to know just what I am looking at!

[Paul LS]

Once you start producing high definition videos you will find VideoReDo indispensible. Quite often when importing HDV MPEG2 files I get the odd frame with pixelization or blockyness... not sure exactly what it is but it is to do with the GOP structure. I just run the files through QuickStream fix and it corrects the issue. Also sometimes while exporting the edited HDV files before burning to HD DVD or AVCHD format I have the same problem. Again running QuickStream fix solves the problem. Note it does not re-render the clips just rewrites the headers.

[RJ Johnston]

I created a .m2t in PreElm 4.0 which is 7 minutes long 1280x720p. File size is 1 GB. Then I used VideoReDo to save it as a mpeg program stream. That took 71 seconds. It would have taken twice as long if I had only one hard drive, but I have two and went from C: to D:.

[RJ Johnston]

I forget to mention that I have a Dell Dimension 3000, 3 GHz P4 HT, 1 GB RAM.

[Ken Jarstad]

Sounds like an excellent application, Robert. $50 usd for the app and $75 usd for the suite.

Another freebie tool I found for converting transport streams (TS) to Program streams (PS) is Avidemux. Unlike the problems I had with Mpeg_Streamclip, Avidemux loaded my m2t file in a reasonable time, responded well when scrolling the timeline and wrote out a PS in a little over twice the time as the clip runtime.

Interestingly, it has built-in support for its own adaptations of common VirtualDub and AviSynth filters! There are some limitations in using them and there doesn't seem to be a facility for adding more filters. However, unlike my Hi8 footage, I haven't yet found any footage from my HV20 that requires any filtering! Lucky me.

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avidemux

[RJ Johnston]

That VideoRedo TV Suite is something new. It includes the ability to author a DVD, burn MPEG to DVD without recoding, and the abiltiy to read VOB files direct from a DVD. The DVD menus are limited. No submenus. I have the VideoRedo Plus version.