[mythtv-users] Editing out commercials

[James L. Paul]

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Perhaps this is somewhat off-topic here, but Isuspect other MythTV users
might have similar interests or experience doing what I want to do.

Context:
I'm only talking about MPEG2 here, specifically the streams that the
PVR-250 and such spew forth. Has anybody here suggestions for removing
commercials from recorded TV shows? I did this with various windows
tools and MPEG1 for years under Windows, and haven't found any reliable
tools in the past couple years of looking under Linux.

Goal:
Take a MPEG2 stream recorded by PVR-250 under MythTV, edit out
commercials, result in a MPEG2 stream usable for CVD or DVD. I don't
want to re-encode. I want to simply do GOP or I-frame cuts and get a
valid usable stream. Demuxing/remuxing is tolerable if audio sync
doesn't drift. Assume that the stream specs are already appropriate for DVD.

What I've tried recently:
This week I tried avidemux, (and avidemux2, what's the difference?) but
could not get anything usable at all. I tried GOPchop, and everything
after the first cut is broken. I used mpgtx to demux the GOPchopped
file, so I could try gop_fixup to fix the broken time indexes left by
GOPchop, but gop_fixup didn't do anything at all, not even walk the file
or change a single bit.

I used mplayer to note all the in/out points of the commercial breaks
and tried using mpgtx to split and join the file. Everything is broken
after the first cut. I tried leaving all the segments unjoined but only
the first segment was palatable to mplex and dvdauthor.

What I ended up doing:
I had one show on the History Channel I wanted to get to my parents
right away, so I left all the commercials in and simply set chapter
marks at the end of each commercial break. Not what I wanted to do at
all. I used dvdauthor and mkisofs to generate the DVD ISO.

Questions:
Is there a tool (under Linux) that I've missed that can do I-frame or
GOP cuts in an MPEG2 program stream and result in a correct and usable
file? (GUI or not.)

Is there something better than mplex to generate a DVD compatible MPEG2
stream from element .m2v and .mp2 files? If not, is there a way to get
mplex to NOT split the output file at the 2G limit? (Using "-S 0" simply
doesn't do anything, it still wants to split the file.)

Is there a tool better than dvdauthor for generating a DVD file
structure from MPEG2 file(s)?

Thanks for any advice!
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