[MPlayer-users] suggestion

[Adam Nielsen]

Oh ok, I see now.

> I do mplayer film.vdr -ss xx
> where xx is a guess of the begining of the movie, I try several times to 
> find the beginning because vdr files are not compliant with ss option.

Yes, I do that as well.  The MPEG-TS files I start with are also very 
unpredictable with seeking (possibly due to infrequent keyframes.)

> After that I encode the film.vdr into a film.avi with codec lavc-mpeg4 
> with the 2 pass method with -ss xx find before.
> Then I open the film.avi with avidemux2 to find the exact ending frame.

Oh ok, I find both the starting frame and ending frame, so I can do this in a 
script:

avidemux2 $OUTNAME-tocut.avi --begin $START --end $END --save $OUTNAME.avi 
--quit

Because once I've found the proper start and end frames, I need to encode the 
file a few times to find a bitrate that gives me an exact file size (and so 
far trial and error seems to be the only way to do this, even in two-pass 
mode.)  Having the starting and ending frames like this means I can automate 
the whole process - I just put the bitrate, start and end frames in a file, 
run my script, and several hours later out comes a Matroska file.

> mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy film.avi -o Film.avi -frames xxxxxx

Oh ok, I use avidemux2 for that step instead.

> But to extract a clip of a few seconds without bad stuff around, there 
> is only one way: have -ss option supporting frame option ;-)

The avidemux2 method can extract a clip only a few seconds long without extra 
frames either side.  Just set your -ss position a little early, and cut off 
those frames with avidemux2 afterwards.

Cheers,
Adam.