[mythtv] Lossless MPEG2 editing!

[Nigel Pearson]

	A fellow Australian, Greg Frost, has coded a utility to cut the
edit blocks from a recording. It is, in his own words, a bit crude,
and has only been tested on DVB recorded MPEG2 streams, but it works!

http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/index.php?page=CrudeMPEG2cutForDVB

If some brave souls could test it on PVR[23]50 recorded MPEG2 streams,
ATSC, MPEG-4 and RTJPEG, and I will summarise results.


	I would like to put it in contrib ASAP, but decided that a little
discussion was probably in order:

1) The program creates a new file that has the edit blocks removed.
    It uses the recordedmarkup table to locate the byte boundaries.
    It also creates a new recorded table entry for the new file

2) Now, I assume that a recordedmarkup entry will always correspond
    to a sequence header or keyframe, but I am not sure if the
    audio and video blocks or packets will always align to these
    byte offsets.

    If that _is_ the case, then this utility should
    be safe with any stream type, right?

3) I would eventually like to make this a program like mythtranscode,
    (e.g. mythchop/mythcut/mythedit) that is invoked from the menu
    while watching/editing a recording, or the contextual menu in the
    Watch/Delete Recordings screens.
    It could also be an inactive item if the recording has no cutlist.

    The alternative would be to shoehorn it into mythtranscode,
    with a new "lossless" profile for the stream types it supports.

    Given that it doesn't actually transcode, I prefer having
    a separate program and set of UI actions for it. Thoughts?

--
Nigel Pearson, nigel at ind.tansu.com.au | "Gentlemen,
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