I have a DVB TV card and have made a lot of recordings with it. Thing is, I haven't really been able to find a good way to edit these recordings. GopChop behaves erratically and can't really be used, ZapDvb MPEG editor works but doesn't pay any attention to keyframes; it'll just edit wherever you say and the video will be corrupted until the next keyframe.

What I really need is an editor, preferrably with a GUI that'll edit the MPEG at keyframes and not require any re-encoding. Apps such as Kino, Cinelerra and Mainactor seem to insist on re-encoding, which is completely unnecessary for my purpose.

Also, I often want to encode these videos to XVID, but with some MPEGs Transcode will simply seg fault, or sometimes return an error about this format not being supported.

Has anybody else used Kaffeine to record and found a solution to these problems?

avidemux2 is very nice. It can import the files I recorded without any problem and you can choose to reencode (for example with xvid codec) or just copy the existing audio and video stream after cropping the recording.
avidemux2 has a nice GUI, seems to handle keyframes ok (it has buttons to jump to the next/last keyframe) and is quite fast when you just copy, but don't reencode.

Thanks Titopoquito, avidemux seems to be pretty good, though it was hell to install.

I'm having a slight problem with it though; I don't seem to be able to export a video with audio and have the audio in sync. If i select MPEG PS A+V as the format, it's out of sync. I'm not really sure what value to set shift to to fix this.

If I set it to MPEG, I can save the video and audio separately, but I'm not really sure how to re-combine them into an MPEG, or even if they'd be in sync at the end.

edit: I used mplex to join the video and audio together, but they are out-of-sync

I record in MPEG-PS format and most often just cut them and save as MPEG PS A+V (with video and audio both set to "copy" instead of recoding them). I have sometimes also audio and video both slightly out of sync and it seems I get quite good results with an audio-delay of about -500 ms (you can adjust it at the left panel in the program window, names "Shift"). I do a small test encoding (5-10 minutes of video) to determine if it's right.

Thanks, that offset is usually the correct one, although it can differ. However, I've found that if you process the video through ZapDVB MPEG Editor first, then use this file in AVIDemux, you'll get the video exactly in sync and won't have to do any offset.

Another question: My original recordings from the DVB card have timecodes that are only a third of what they should be - about 20 minutes for an hour long video.
ZapDVB MPEG messes up the timecodes in its output even more - a twenty minute MPEG will come out with an end timecode of about 7 seconds!

If I put this through AVIDemux, the codes go back to what they were, about one-third. Is this some odity of AVIDemux, MPEG, or just Kaffeine showing the wrong time? Is there a way to correct the timecode?


Oh, and a useful tip I've found: If you're using AVIDemux to compress your videos into MPEG4, you may find there is no need to re-compress the sound, since it is probably already in MP2 (it certainly is when I've tried it- the "audio / video file information" button will tell you), so just set the sound to Copy.

Sounds promising. I don't unterstand why avmidemux (on my old machine) told me about the offset of each video when I opened a file and had no problem with that -- this has gone since I did a fresh install.

I don't know a solution to this, but have the same problem. This too was no problem in my last install -- recording with Kaffeine and saving again with avidemux corrected this, so that Kaffeine counted the playing time just fine. I don't know what has gone wrong now, since I am doing the same steps do process my video files.

Yes, that's nice. Although I prefer to convert with faac or lame at the moment to get smaller audio part. As long as I don't process a musical recording the quality is just fine with both of them IMHO

The best is to record as TS and then use PojectX (a java app) to cut and demux, then replex with "mplex -f8 -o my_movie.vob MOVIE.m2v MOVIE.mp2".
Even with a dammaged stream, this will give you a perfect audio/video sync.

What do I have to do to output the syncronised audio and video files with ProjectX? Do I just select "patch video basics", set a filename and hit "quickstart"?

Also, how can I edit with this software, or is that best left to AVIdemux2?

@ hftom:

Even if some time has gone since your post: Thank you for your suggestions, the first test worked marvelously.

@ philipm:

If you start ProjectX click on the "+" button in the bottom left corner to select the file you want to edit. In the video image in the middle, use the arrow buttons to browse to the beginning and end of your film/sequence you want. At both of them click at the "+" right of it (here it has violet color). You see that in the former complete green timeline there are now green (to be copied) and red (will get cut out) parts.
Then click on "prepare" on the left, choose "demux" at the upper left and start the play button.

Then use mplex as hftom suggested. It's in the mjpegtools package ( http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/ ).

Thanks to everyone for their help. I now use Project X from the command line, then mplex, then edit with AVIDemux2. It seems to produce the same result whether you edit with ProjectX or AVIDemux2.

BUT:

With some footage, such as that recorded from "The Hits" (Freeview channel 18 in the UK), the sound drops out every few seconds, and video jumps, too. A few other channels seem to have this problem too. In the normal course of its operation, it will sometimes drop the sound, presumably as part of the resyncing (which is a shame, since it was on the original), but this is completely different. It's unwatchable! Any idea what can be done?

try "dvbcut" for fine quick editing