How do you clean up your recorded TV?

[Guest virtualtinker]

So with the addition of live tv, I picked up a tuner and got to work with scheduling and recording television episodes.  What I'd like to do is clean up those shows to remove the commercials, get them converted to an MKV, and upload them back up as part of my media server.  I've looked at MCEBuddy for doing the commercial cleanup, but the MKV conversion it does seems a bit more compressed than I'd like.  I figured that I'd ask you guys who currently record and store TV on your media servers, what process do you typically use in stripping the commercials and re-encoding it into whatever format you prefer?

[jordy 284]

Hey, I use "Video Re-Do" in conjunction with "VAP" - one of it's add-ons, to mark and cut the commercials, then MeGui to convert to MKV, MP4 etc. Once set-up, if your TV broadcast streams contain meta data with season & episode numbers etc there is minimal interaction required. Cutting the commercials requires a manual review of the cuts provided by VAP (to make sure you get them all and don't lose any of the show), saving the resulting mpg file, adding it to MeGui for conversion then let your meta data provider (MB3, Meta-Browser etc) do the rest. It does take a little setting up but once done it's all good.

cheers.

[Tikuf 663]

"Video Re-Do" in conjunction with "VAP"

 

Yup perfect combo for me as well. Except I just convert them from mpeg2 wtv to h264 wtv files since the transcoding of them works well (works with mpeg2 as well)

[Lee 205]

VideRedo is a bit pricey tho!

 

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[Tikuf 663]

Ya it is, When I bought it all my bd rips, dvd rips I made into wtv files so at the time it was well worth the coin. It is a very good program and still worth the coin but if mb3 was around back then I doubt I would have shelled out for it.

[Guest virtualtinker]

Thanks for the replies.  Looking at VideoReDo, it seems like a pretty decent tool.  I've been using the trial along with VAP and I like the automation in running the ad cutting tool in advance. I think what I need to look at next would be some kind of custom .ini's to see if I can get the ad cutting tool better tuned; the first few shows I ran against it were pretty hit and miss.

[jordy 284]

if you use Comskip as your commercial detector, you can adjust the detection settings to suit your TV stations idiosyncrasies. It takes a little time to get it right tho. Mine is pretty good right now, only minimal adjustments req'd.  Takes me about 30 secs to go thru and confirm/adjust the cuts. All in all, about 1 min of hands on time per show and its cut, named and ready to be converted and transferred into my library

[leebo 8]

Yup perfect combo for me as well. Except I just convert them from mpeg2 wtv to h264 wtv files since the transcoding of them works well (works with mpeg2 as well)

How is the quality of the h264 conversions? I think I tried that at first, but switched to converting to mpg2 program stream, then encode with Handbrake to mkv.I wasn't happy with the h264 quality if I recall.

 

Sent from my Nexus 7

[jordy 284]

Gotta be honest. As good as VRD is, I get much better results with MeGui. Using x264 encoder. Which VRD does not. afaik.

 

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[leebo 8]

VRD does not what? It does convert to 264. I just don't like the quality.

 

Sent from my generic not my computer device.

[jordy 284]

Vrd does not use the x264 encoder which is by far the best imo.

 

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[elsmandino 4]

Hi,

 

I have been looking for ages for an editor(s) that does all the following:

 

* Allows frame accurate cutting

* Cleans up any errors in the feed

* Allows me to convert the video in to an MKV file whilst preserving the MP2 audio.

 

The only thing that I have come accross that does all the above is VideoReDo but as Lee says above it is very expensive in the circumstances.

 

I was wondering whether anyone could recommend any free (Linux or Windows) apps that would do the job.

 

I think that the closest I got was with a program called Project-X.  This was great (but prohibitively complicated to use) - it did not do frame accurate cutting (though pretty close) but did a great job of correcting errors in the stream and stripping out the stuff that was not used.

 

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks

[mentasm 43]

MCEbuddy

 

Cuts ads, recodes to mkv and renames and moves my stuff into my MB3 collection.  MKV settings were fairly configurable from what I remember, but I'm dealing with crappy Australian broadcast quality to begin with.  No full 1080p to be seen from the broadcasters.  I certainly don't notice a quality drop from what I see in live TV.  I will also admity that the things I bother to record these days are of low importance in my collection anyway.  It's most MotoGP and cooking shows....maybe an odd Grand Designs or somethign similar.  All my proper TV series come from other sources.