I’ve recently realised that MythTV is getting very close to filling my 200GB drive, so I’ve decided that I need to burn some stuff to DVD. This seems straightforward, the problem is that I need to edit each file to chop the ads out (MythTV has ad-detection and the ability to transcode and cut them out, but it only ever detects ads where there aren’t any). I’ve looked at every video editing tool I can find and none of them seem to be capable of doing the very simple task of letting me select and delete a section of video from an MPEG file. Here’s what I’ve tried:
- Cinelerra: over-complicated interface, but most importantly it crashed when I tried to select a section of video I wanted to delete. Useless.
- Kino: can only open DV files which FFmpeg seemingly can’t convert to without screwing with the video size and aspect ratio.
- LiVES: 64-bit compilation broken.
- kfilm: 64-bit binary has broken dependencies (requires libraries that don’t exist) and running make causes it to unexpectedly download a copy of FFmpeg (!) which doesn’t compile in any case.
- PiTiVi: latest stable release has a bug which stops it running and the CVS has a dependancy which requires a newer version of GStreamer than my distro has. I’m not upgrading my whole distribution to an unstable development version just so I can run a video editor – the stable version is unstable enough as it is. Compiling GStreamer from source requires manually compiling about 10 different packages, which is not reasonable.
- OpenVIP: uses a non-standard compilation process which gives screen-fulls of unhelpful output seemingly without doing anything useful. Couldn’t make sense of it.
- kdenlive: again, only seems to support DV which is no use to me. Compile was broken too – the bug concerned seems to be fixed in CVS (which doesn’t compile due to other problems) but I created a patch to fix it in case other people encounter it before there’s a new release (current is 0.2.4).
- LVE: lots of silly compile-time requirements – must be in a particular directory, must have a copy of FFmpeg source in a specific place, etc. FFmpeg doesn’t compile in any case because of the options passed to it by LVE’s make file – gave up.
So that’s it – every video editing tool I could find, none of which could meet my very basic requirements.
Situations such as this are very depressing to say the least.
Take a look at avidemux.
Andreas
Avidemux has done the trick!
The UI could do with a bit of polishing, but apart from that it works really well. Thanks!