Easy commercial free solution

[wolkowh]

Hi there,
To eliminate commercials I just do the following in Maestro:

1. Define the start and end of a break with a chapter break and name them "Commercial Break 1 Start" "Commercial Break 1 End"
2. Go the the chapter point immediately prior to "Commercial Break 1 Start" and set the End Action property to "Commercial Break 2 End"

This then causes the DVD player when it reaches the end of the chapter ("Commercial Break 1 Start" chapter point) to skip to "Commercial Break 1 End"

Note, this does not eliminate the space taken by the commercial and does not work properly during ff or rewind, but it is 1000% better than editing out commercials (and I don't lose synch)


When I am realy lazy, i just set chapter points at the end of the commercial breaks and burn in Spruce Up

Howard

[captain_video]

I basically do the same thing with SpruceUp. I sat down one night and started to learn how to use Maestro but when I saw that you have to import the buttons and backgrounds from other programs I stayed with SpruceUp. I place chapter stops at the beginning and end of each commercial break, although placing them at the end would really be all that I need. I figure it's less work to press the chapter skip on the remote when a commercial kicks in than to go through all the extra steps required to skip over the commercials in Maestro, I've gotten it down to where I can add chapter stops to three episodes of Babylon 5, insert my main menu and a secondary menu and edit the show titles in under 10 minutes. I made up a master template containing my menus and buttons so all I have to do is import my shows in SpruceUp to develop the .prv files and then re-import them into a new project with my pre-made template. Edit the episode titles, add the chapter stops, and associate the buttons with the appropriate chapter of each show and I'm good to go. By the way, Howard, thanks for the original info on using SpruceUp. I'd rather spend my time enjoying my recorded shows than spending the time to author DVDs that I may only watch once in a great while. I've started to build up quite a library of PPV movies so I've always got something good to watch.

[wolkowh]

U are missing the boat with Maestro.

All you have to do is put the buttons in place with a photo editor and, draw a rectangle over your button area, and then go to the tab to auto assign navigation. The extra steps add about 2 min and then you can watch B5 with seamless commercial skips

I can send you a B5 Maestro Authoring kit if you'd like :)
Howard

[RxMan]

OK. Maestro allows for 'auto chapter skipping' but Spruce does not? I have Windows ME (ugh) on my main computer and Maestro only works with Pro or XP.

Howard,

I'm not sure what happened with mailing me the disc, etc...but, I got it to work on my own. I appreciate your offer and all of your other help.

You and Captain_Video have made the whole process a lot easier.

[qarlo]

wolkowh,

Is there a good way to edit out commercials if I want to, or am I stuck re-encoding? I know editing them out is 1000% worse <g>, but what if I really want to?

Thanks for your how to DVD. I've ordered my DVR104 and I can't wait to play!

Q

[laserfan]

Originally posted by qarlo
...Is there a good way to edit out commercials if I want to...No. Or at least if you find one tell the rest of us about it!

Editing to my knowledge requires that you mux the m2a and m2v files into an mpg and then use an MPEG editor on it. But I have tried this and the resulting edited .mpg file loses audio sync at the edit points, which gets progressively worse, resulting in an unwatchable program. I suspect there is a problem with timestamps somewhere but don't know enuf about this to suggest a cause.

I have one MPEG editor that I haven't tried yet (ULead's VideoEditor apparently accepts both mpgs and m2a/m2v files) but again I don't think anyone has figured this out yet.