Editing MPEG-2 videos without re-encoding them?

[Number9]

Hi All,

Working on a project at the moment which requires about 1 hour and 40 minutes on a DVD.

I transferred the video using a Pioneer standalone DVD recorder / HDD, and was able to adjust the bitrate to exactly match the disc duration for optimum quality.

Now, I needed to edit some sections out of the footage, so I did what I usually do and used TMPEGEnc Plus to cut out sections of the footage and clip the frame to get rid of the rough edges. But because the bitrate was already lower than I would have liked, once it re-encoded the video without the offending sections and rough edges, the video is now horribly blocky.

I understand totally why this is, as doing two lots of encoding at 4.5MBps is never going to be great, but I'm wondering if there is a simple freeware tool I can use to trim sections out of an M2V video stream without actually re-encoding the video.

Obviously the answer is to capture to PC in AVI and then compress to MPEG-2 once it's edited, but that's not an option at the moment.

Any ideas?

Cheers

James

[DVDDoug]

I haven't used TMPEGEnc, but I'll bet there's an option to not-recode.

I haven't used any freeware editors either, but I've used Video Studio 8 and it recodes only where necessary. For example, when I joined two MPEG clips with a transition, I got gross pixelization during the transition. Womble MPEG Video Wizard also only re-codes where necessary, and the transitions are less blocky.

[Number9]

Thanks Doug - I'm also sure there's an option not to re-encode but I certainly haven't been able to find how to do it... A bit more googling required now I think.

For what it's worth, though, I did find an excellent freeware MPEG cutter called cuttermaran (www.cuttermaran.de), which does exactly what I wanted without affecting the video at all - superb!

The only drawback is that it can't remove the rough edges on a VHS source, which I can do with TMPGEnc (but again you have to re-encode to do this...)

James