Well when I rip my DVDs with a software program and the music all comes out on my computer as one file then I need to split that file into tracks and I need a simple editor to do that.
Avidemux is good except for this one time where I have a file that is 1 hour 50 seconds long and for some reason the program says it is only 36 minutes long so I was not going to be able to work on all the tracks. So I had a look at some other programs. VidCutter looked good but it's useless when it comes to save the clips because it seems they all save to one file and it wouldn't save anything. LosslessCut looked good too but couldn't cope with the size of the track. I have had Pitivi and haven't tried it this time, in the past it wasn't very stable.
So I ended up just using VidCutter to mark the start and end points of each track then I worked out how to feed the numbers into ffmpeg command line to extract and convert the video. When you look at this you realise Avidemux is just a front end for ffmpeg.
Here is a typical command line for one of the tracks
- ffmpeg -ss '00:19:15.888' -t '00:05:36.035' -i VTS_02_1.VOB -b 2M -acodec mp3 -vcodec mpeg4 afl05.mkv
The parameters are: - -ss tells it to seek to a position on the input track
- -t tells it the duration you want to extract
- -i tells it the input file name
- -b tells it the bit rate to use
- -acodec is the audio codec to convert to, in this case mpeg 3
- -vcodec is the video codec to convert to, mpeg 4 in this case
- the last parameter is the destination file name and with the mkv extension it can work out how to package the clip into a Matroska container.
So I was able to extract all of the clips the same way and everything came out well.
