[MPlayer-users] Video editor advice?

[rcooley]

Dave Botsch wrote:
> 1. Use mplayer to figure out start and end points of each "segment". Dump these
> segments to separate audio and video streams (I believe you can use -ss to
> specify start time and -frames the number of frames to play... a note... if you
> are using the OSD, the time shown and the time you pass to -ss don't match up
> for some reason.. some trial and error to get it to start at the right place
> will be necessry).

Yikes!  That's a load of work for simple editing.

I would suggest looking at -edl and -edlout...  I tried to use it for 
editing, but -edlout isn't precise enough to make it easy.  You have to 
edit each one by hand, test it by playing the video with the edl, and 
making sure it skips right where you want it to.  Then, finally, you can 
use mplayer and the edl to dump an edited file.  I though it was way too 
much work to be worthwhile, but it would be a lot easier than guessing 
the -ss positions for each point...  Although, mencoder doesn't work 
with -edl, so you have to use mplayer to dump the edited file.

Note to developers:  I would suggest a minor addition to '-edlout'... 
Instead of one key (i), have two (j?).  Then, it would be easy for 
someone to mark the beginning (i) and end (j) of a section they want to 
skip.  Provided -edlout is precise enough, nobody would even have to 
edit the edl file.  Then, it would be nice if mencoder supported the 
edl, so you wouldn't have to create a second (edited) copy of the file 
before re-encoding, you could skip that step all together.
   Of course, it's just a suggestion.