GUI Video Editor Recommendations

Woodsman · 10-16-2009, 10:10 PM

I'm looking for a GUI video editor. My criteria are simple:

1. Low learning curve.
2. Presently, my sole purpose for the GUI tool is to remove ads/commercials from TV recordings.
3. Finding the ads/commercials must be an easy and quick process.
4. A slackbuild script is available for 12.2.

The TV files are AVIs created with mencoder.

I do not expect to perform this task often. Because of original length, most movies shown on TV are horribly stripped of original content and often are not worth saving. There are pleasant exceptions of course, which prompted today's project. I recorded an old movie for a friend. The original movie is 80 minutes and one of those rare movies that is no longer copyrighted.

MythTV has a auto-removal option, but that software is way beyond my needs for such a project.

This afternoon I edited the recording manually to remove the ads/commercials. The process was straightforward: fast-forward through the file with Xine, note the start and end time for the commercial breaks, and then use mencoder to create 8 AVI files from the original recording. I then used avimerge to merge the 8 files into one and devede to create an ISO image.

I received one valuable lesson in this project: I want to find the commercial breaks quickly. Easily marking them for removal and then creating a new video file would be bonuses.

Hence my request for recommendations.

As always, thanks for your thoughts.

P.S. If you have experience with cutting commercials from TV recordings, please share your tips and techniques!

Einars · 10-16-2009, 11:36 PM

I think avidemux would be perfectly suitable - I use it myself for tasks you described. Basically, mark start and end of commercial and hit delete, then save to desired format.

amiga32 · 10-17-2009, 12:44 AM

avidemux

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

disturbed1 · 10-17-2009, 01:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Einars

I think avidemux would be perfectly suitable - I use it myself for tasks you described. Basically, mark start and end of commercial and hit delete, then save to desired format.

My first thoughts as well.

Make sure you cut on I frames, no need to re-encode (unless you want to), just use stream copy. You can navigate the stream using the number pad. 8 jumps forward to the next I frame, 6 goes forward frame by frame. Opposite for 2 and 4.

[ marks beginning cut point ] marks ending cut point. Once [] are defined delete to remove the data between the cut points.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12...edia/avidemux/

Tips for cutting commercials -
My tuners are hardware mpeg (HVR1600, PVR500, PVR150), I've used gopchop and dvbcut, though usually just let MythTV do it's magic. You can also have mythcommflag -gencutlist and mythtranscode -honorcutlist, and finally mytharchive to create/burn the dvd. It's all in the wiki.

jedi_sith_fears · 10-17-2009, 02:23 AM

Try Avidemux, you can also try Handbrake, or mencoder-gui.

andrew.46 · 10-17-2009, 03:24 AM

Hi Woodsman,

It is a pity that you are after a gui solution. If you were after a cli tool avisplit (part of the transcode package) would be your friend once you found the time spacings for the commercial. A single commandline would split the file, using the -t option, and join the parts together, using the -c option. But sounds like this is not really what you are after...

Andrew

slackd · 10-17-2009, 03:46 AM

1. Avidemux2
2. handbrake-gui & mkvmerge

ppr:kut · 10-17-2009, 04:18 AM

definitely avidemux. If your input material is mpeg1/2 and you output to the same format you can even select the copy audio/video codec, which speeds things up tremendously

Alien Bob · 10-17-2009, 05:52 AM

Packages (and SlackBuilds) for avidemux and handbrake are available from my repository as well. Handbrake is a definite must-try.

See http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien...d_slackbuilds/ for avidemux (you'll find lame and faac here too).
Below http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/ you'll find handbrake and all the other dependencies.

Eric

Woodsman · 10-17-2009, 11:52 AM

Thanks everybody! I'm not a GTK fan (that's just the way my brain is wired

), but looks like avidemux or handbrake seem like the candidates at the moment. However, the handbrake web sites looks stale, which often indicates little or no development.

I guess now the next question is what is the most efficient/fastest method for finding the commercial breaks when using such an editor? I presume I still have to manually scroll through the video much like I did yesterday with Xine? Or does avidemux have some kind of search feature? According to disturbed1, seems I have to learn something about I frames and group-of-picture (GOP) boundaries.

I will be grateful for anybody pointing me towards some links that explain video editing concepts (rather than how to use such related software), which would help me learn more about the overall process.

The AVI files created by mencoder contain the following:

Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 704x480 [PAR 10:11 DAR 4:3], 15000 kb/s, 29.97 tbr, 29.97 tbn, 59.94 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 192 kb/s

I'm using an HVR-1600 and HVR-1250 to record and the channels are all digital.

I don't care about the commercials when I watch a recording. I can fast-forward through the video. Only when I want to preserve the video does this task seem like a chore.

Question: Any recommendations for QT based tools for editing and DVD authoring that run on 12.2? I'm just not a fan of GTK.

I was hoping I could build Kdenlive on 12.2, but that does not look possible (dependencies on KDE4 packages). A QT DVD authoring tool would be much appreciated too. Yes, I have 13.0 installed on one box, but I have not been using because KDE 4 frustrates me right now.

Quote:

It is a pity that you are after a gui solution. If you were after a cli tool avisplit (part of the transcode package). . . .

Oh, I'm not against using the command line.

All of my recordings (shell scripts) and yesterday's editing was done through the command line. The key point is finding the commercial breaks, which to me seems to require some kind of visual interface.

Looking at the avisplit man page indicates there is an option to split a file based upon the timeline. However, that seems just as much a manual process as what I performed yesterday with mencoder. Seems that with both commands I have to first visually scan the video with a player and manually note the time marks. Cumbersome.

As I already need a (GUI) player to find the commercial breaks, I might as well enjoy the convenience of marking the spots right then and there. I noticed that yesterday when I was using Xine to find the breaks --- sure would have been nice to mark the spots immediately rather than use additional steps. And would have been nice too to mark an exact frame rather than "guess" with fractional seconds.

By the way, yesterday's project was a success. If you are curious, the movie was The Magic Sword. The movie is for a friend and I already burned the DVD.

dugan · 10-17-2009, 12:34 PM

I have a Cinerlerra tutorial...
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/~dugan/linux-fanvidz.html

jedi_sith_fears · 10-17-2009, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alien Bob

Packages (and SlackBuilds) for avidemux and handbrake are available from my repository as well. Handbrake is a definite must-try.

Eric, I found youur avidemux2 2.4.4 to be nice and in working state, but 2.5.1 dosen't work with your slackbuild by modifying the package version.

I tried building from source. This works fine for me, however, the audio codec selection menu is unavilable.

larryhaja · 10-17-2009, 01:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jedi_sith_fears

Eric, I found youur avidemux2 2.4.4 to be nice and in working state, but 2.5.1 dosen't work with your slackbuild by modifying the package version.

Since avidemux 2.5.0 the program is now built in two steps. First build the program then build the plugins.

slackd · 10-17-2009, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by larryhaja

Since avidemux 2.5.0 the program is now built in two steps. First build the program then build the plugins.

i know, i tried that but the plugins still dont work!..
first i complied the main program from source successfully, but then i try to compile the plugins and they just dont seem to work.

i even tried a slackbuild from slacky.eu..

Code:

# Exit on most errors
set -e

CWD=`pwd`
TMP=${TMP:-/tmp/tgz}
PKG=$TMP/package/avidemux
NAME=avidemux
VERSION=2.5.1
ARCH=${ARCH:-x86_64}
BUILD=2

SOURCE=http://garr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/avidemux/$NAME'_'$VERSION.tar.gz

if [ ! -e $NAME'_'$VERSION.tar.gz ]; then
wget -c $SOURCE
fi

if [ "$ARCH" = "i486" ]; then
  SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -march=i486 -mtune=i686"; SLKLDFLAGS=""; LIBDIRSUFFIX=""; CHOST=i486
elif [ "$ARCH" = "i686" ]; then
  SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -mtune=i686"; SLKLDFLAGS=""; LIBDIRSUFFIX=""; CHOST=i486
elif [ "$ARCH" = "x86_64" ]; then
  SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -fPIC"; SLKLDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib64"; LIBDIRSUFFIX="64"
fi

if [ ! -d $TMP ]; then
 mkdir -p $TMP
fi
if [ ! -d $PKG ]; then
 mkdir -p $PKG
fi

cd $TMP
tar xzvf $CWD/$NAME'_'$VERSION.tar.gz
cd $NAME'_'$VERSION
chmod -R u+w,go+r-w,a-s .
chown -R root:root .

# Compiling Avidemux 2.5.x
# The main difference is that the build is split in two parts*
# The avidemux main application(s)
# The plugins

# Building main application
# Compile the package
( mkdir build \
    && cd build \
     &&  cmake .. \
    -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS:STRING="$SLKCFLAGS" \
    -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS:STRING="$SLKCFLAGS" \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
    -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc \
    -DMAN_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/man \
    -DINCLUDE_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/include \
    -DLIB_SUFFIX:STRING=${LIBDIRSUFFIX} \
    -DLIB_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/lib${LIBDIRSUFFIX} \
    -DBUILD_EXAMPLES:BOOL=ON \
    -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON \
    && make  \
  && make install \
&& make install DESTDIR=$PKG ) 


# Building plugins

( mkdir -p plugins/build \
     &&  cd plugins/build \
         &&  cmake .. \
            -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS:STRING="$SLKCFLAGS" \
            -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS:STRING="$SLKCFLAGS" \
            -DLIB_SUFFIX:STRING=${LIBDIRSUFFIX} \
	    -DLIB_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/lib${LIBDIRSUFFIX} \
	    -DAVIDEMUX_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
            -DAVIDEMUX_LIB_DIR=/usr/lib64 \
            -DAVIDEMUX_SOURCE_DIR=/tmp/tgz/avidemux_2.5.1 \
            -DAVIDEMUX_CORECONFIG_DIR=/tmp/tgz/avidemux_2.5.1/build/config \
            -DMAN_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/man \
            -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
            && make \
       && make install DESTDIR=$PKG )

# Just a workaroud. The install routine put the file inside /usr/local/lib. Maybe a bug!
mv $PKG/usr/local/lib/ADM_plugins $PKG/usr/lib
rm -r $PKG/usr/local

pokipoki08 · 01-27-2010, 02:02 PM

Try this

sh bootStrap.sh

http://avidemux.org/admWiki/index.php?title=Install_2.5