Over the years, I’ve fallen victim to early adopter challenges. I built my first DVR enabled PC in 2001. I’ve continued to snub the traditional consumer market, preferring instead to go it alone, and have more control. I have a lot of television recordings collected in numerous formats. So large, that the ability to reduce my storage needs is important. In fact, I started to delete recordings simply to save space. Early on, because most recordings were in standard definition (SD), I eventually chose to burn video’s to DVD to save space. Overtime, storing and organizing the library of DVD’s became cumbersome too.
I really didn’t like the fact that my recordings included “wasted” space storing commercials as well as the program. So I tried some applications that were designed to automatically detect commercials and cut them out. Early on, the results weren’t very good at all. So I started working on a process that I could use to cut out commercials and keep only the portions of the video that I wanted. This is really handy in reducing the size of football games for example…
What I wanted:
- A simple method to mark the start and end of clips fast and easily.
- Control over quality and container formats.
- Fast performance.
- The ability to edit without having to re-encode video.
- The ability to retain captions.