A friend has supplied me with an entire season of one of my favourite programmes. Now I have already managed to successfully burn these to DVD to play back in the home (using WinBlows).

However, I notice a lengthy black screen at the add breaks.

I would like to trim out these black screens.

Optionally, for sake of completeness (OCD?), I would like to insert a splash screen. (I already have the clip to insert (a small part of the title sequence)).

So far I have tried AvidMux (Under Windows) and while it split, trimmed, inserted and joined the file(s), I was still left with the black screens.

I have just put together a new Debian system and planned on using it for my video needs as my Win7 craptop has seen better days (but is still needed).

So... bearing in mind I have little knowledge about video editing and formats, and have only just found out about I and B frames... What can you recommend?

What software (preferably free) will allow me to split, trim and join a H.264 MP4 quickly

Or am I seeking something that is not possible.

If the latter, what is the quickest and least lossy way to convert, split, trim, join and possibly re-convert before burning to DVD?

Thanks for your input.

(My current Linux system is very basic

Debian, XFCE, Thunar, XFBurn, Google Chrome (not Chromium), VLC and Bombono.

I am toying whether to keep VLC and Bombono or replace with MPlayer (+Mencoder) and DeVeDe.

I currently don't have FFMPEG, and really want to keep the system as light as possible - although K3B is calling. If I succumb to K3B, I might also choose a few other KDE apps.

You can remove part of the video with ffmpeg or mencoder.
If you wanted to remove the last 30 seconds of a video that is 5 min long.
ffmpeg
mencoder
Or remove the first 30 seconds.
To join video's together, the files will need to be the same codec, size, bitrate...the same.
The video that you want to insert needs to be the exact same bitrate, size, codec etc as the program video.

There are lots of threads on LQ and the internet on ffmpeg and mencoder usage.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/ffmpeg
http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/TitleIndex
http://linux.die.net/man/1/mencoder

2 members found this post helpful.

You said you have a number of black screens throughout the videos. If so, you can use mplayer to edit out the points (i.e black screens) throughout the video(s). The option is -edlout.

Excert from man page for mplayer
In plain english, for your situation. as you play the video, press the letter i at the start of a black screen and again at the end of a black screen. You repeat this process each time a black screen appears.

BTW, you don't need to watch the video at normal speed, you can skim fast forward or backward to search for black screens.

This is how you use the -edlout switch

The editllist could be any filename you want.

To test the edited points with mplayer. Type

Note: Your original video file is still in tacked, nothing has been altered. Mplayer is just playing the video and skipping edited points from the editlist file.

After previewing it and if all black screens have been edited out, you can use mencoder to make a newly edited version of the video.

Well that's it. I used this method when I want to edit out TV commercials.

1 members found this post helpful.