Linux Multimedia Hacks

Cut Commercials

Use avidemux to quickly and easily cut commercials out of your recorded TV shows.

So you have set up MythTV [Hack #77] , retrieved shows from your TiVo, or otherwise have some sort of television show in digital form on your computer. One nice feature of a VCR, TiVo, or other video recorder is the ability to quickly skip commercials in TV shows you have recorded. If you have recorded a show in digital format, you can certainly just fast-forward each time a commercial appears, but that requires extra work each time you watch the show. Also, with some time-based recording methods you end up getting a bit of the previous show and perhaps a bit of the next show in your recording in case your clock differs from the TV station’s clock. If you plan to archive the show and watch it multiple times, you probably want to crop out all those commercials and bits from other shows. This is especially true if you plan on converting the video to VCD, SVCD, or DVD format, as discussed in [ Hacks #69 and #70 ].

Now, before you get visions of sitting behind a huge sound board or in front of three monitors full of advanced video-editing software, let me say that cropping out commercials is not very difficult or time-consuming if you use the proper tools. After all, if it takes more work to crop the commercials than to watch them, what’s the point? With the avidemux video-editing software, and particularly with its “Scan for black frames” feature, you can locate and remove commercials ...