[MPlayer-users] mplayer-time to frame-offset

[Christian Buck]

Hi!

i have a videofile which is mpeg2, cbr, consisting only of i-frames
and about 18 minutes long. and i have a list of timecodes where i
should cut this video. and yes, i read all about -ss and -endpos and
the involved inaccurancies after searching this list. unfortunately
this was of little help.

I have a timecode of 14:44 and -ss 14:44 starts at the wrong offset,
but -ss 14:46 is right (it starts at 14:44). When i just seek to 14:44
using <- and -> i get the correct frames. same for gmplayer.

i also have a windowsbox so i tried virtualdub. seeking to 14:44 gives
me the same output as mencoder. then i tried transcode, using frame or
time boundaries and got the same result. transcode parses the file
from the beginning and seems to be quite accurate in other cases.

then i tried to convert my video to another format and got lots of
duplicate frame errors. this was also already discussed on this list.
using several programs and codecs i ended up with a set of videos with
an interesting property: when i seek to 14:44 i have the same frame
mencoder gave me before. So may be duplicate frames were dropped and
now the video has less frames so it is shorter. but until position
14:44 there were way more than 25*2 duplicate frames so counting
duplicate frames is no option to convert my timecodes to the desired
ones.

and this is what i'm asking for: how can i convert the time shown by
mplayer (and several other players) to a frame offset or cuttable
time?



thx
buck

and excuse me if the perfect answer was already pointed out on this
list, i did not find it. (my problem is not explained in the manpage
;)