
Luckily, the black frames before and after every commercial break in a show usually, but not always, become keyframes, making it easy to snip out commercials without losing more than a few frames of actual show (at worst).

ts file without having to redo all these calculations – which takes a good deal longer and might reduce video quality – you need to make all your edits on keyframes. That helps squeeze the original video down to a smaller size. Every frame of video between those keyframes just keeps track of the changes between the keyframe and the current frame, leaving the unchanged pixels in the image alone. ts file only saves certain frames from its original source, known as keyframes. To understand why that matters, you'll need to learn a little about video compression's mathematical tricks.īasically, a. The double backward and forward arrows skip from your current spot on the playhead to the previous or next keyframe in the video. Besides that, you'll need to concentrate on these four buttons in the controls below: The playhead slider moves you forward and backward through the video. Open Avidemux and drag your video file into its main window.įor now, focus on the lower left corner.
#AVIDEMUX MAC HOW TO#
How to cut out commercials in Avidemux Step 1 ts files, minus commercials, with no recompression, lost quality, or messed-up audio. And as long as you follow the rules and check the right boxes, you can save. Once you get the hang of its quirky interface, you can edit.

But since then, updates to the app seem to have done it a world of good. When I first investigated the free, open-source Avidemux, it behaved like a hot mess. But even with Handbrake 1.2's embrace of speed-boosting hardware acceleration, the process took a long time, and the three different compression cycles it required took their toll on the final video's quality.
#AVIDEMUX MAC MP4#
mp4 with Handbrake, I could move them into iMovie for fast, frame-by-frame edits. ts files, leaving it with the same slowdown problems and poor results that plagued QuickTime Player.īy converting. But after I first published this article, subsequent updates to Shotcut seemed to break its ability to seamlessly edit. Initially, I had better luck with Shotcut, a free, open-source video editor that works with. But iMovie won't accept them, and QuickTime Player struggled with them, slowing to a crawl as I made more and more edits, and producing final movies with out-of-synch audio. In theory, you could manually edit these streams. Plex, Channels DVR, and HDHomeRun DVR all record episodes in MPEG Transport Stream or. If you want to preserve your shows in flawless, ad-free glory, take matters into your own hands. But any part of an episode that it cuts is gone for good. Plex's automatic commercial-skipping works well enough for casual use. In my testing, I wasn't able to find or record any shows with segments short enough to confirm that. On another occasion, it inexplicably excised the first minute or two from a couple of acts in a two-hour episode - annoying, but I could still follow the action.īased on previous experiments with homebrewed Plex commercial-skipping, Plex might also confuse super-short sections at the end of half-hour shows for ads, and lop them off.

That said, Plex once ate about 15 seconds from the beginning of one act, likely because it mistook an all-black frame in the show for the end of another commercial. In most cases, its guesses at where ads ended and the show began were off by a second at worst. Plex did a generally respectable job of clipping commercials. You can't watch an episode until it's finished recording.

#AVIDEMUX MAC 720P#
In my tests, my 2012 Mac mini's CPU held up fine, and recordings processed in roughly 13-23 minutes per hour, depending on whether they were 720p or 1080i. Plex warns that automatic commercial-skipping requires extra CPU power and time.
#AVIDEMUX MAC TV#
You can enable that for every recording via Settings > Live TV & DVR > DVR Settings, or on a show-by-show basis through each show's advanced Record Options. Plex can now remove commercials from your DVR recordings. This takes a few clicks per commercial break, but it's the fastest, easiest way to ignore ads. Jump too far ahead? Try the 10-second back button. If you have plenty of hard drive space, watch shows soon after you record them, and delete them promptly afterward, just click the 30-second fast-forward button in Plex's viewing controls whenever ads begin. Stay tuned to the end of this article to see how other Mac DVR apps can alleviate your ad aggravation. Since I'm running a Plex DVR, I'll focus on three ways to crush commercials in that app, from the simplest to the most complex. Sure, they help pay for your favorite TV shows, but they also eat up time and, in a Mac DVR app, hard drive space.
