dvbcut is a Qt application that allows you to select certain parts of an MPEG transport stream (as received via Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB) and save these parts into a single MPEG output file. It follows a "keyhole surgery" approach where the input video and audio data is mostly kept unchanged, and only very few frames at the beginning and/or end of the selected range are re-encoded in order to obtain a valid MPEG file.
dvbcut needs to create index information on an MPEG file first. Therefore, when loading an MPEG transport stream file, it also asks you for a filename of an index file. If you choose an existing file, it is loaded and used as index if suitable. (That means, that dvbcut performs some sanity checks on the index itself and also checks if the index describes the chosen MPEG file.) If you select a file which does not yet exist, dvbcut creates the necessary index in place.
After opening the MPEG file, you can navigate through the video by means of a linear and a log scale slider. While the first represents the whole video, the latter enables you to precisely select frames close to the current frame. At any place in the video, you can add START, STOP, CHAPTER and BOOKMARK markers. Markers are shown in the list on the left. With the START and STOP markers you determine what parts of the video you want to write to a new file. dvbcut starts at the first START marker and proceeds until it encounters a STOP marker. If there are more START markers after that STOP, it will continue at the next START marker, and so on. Every START marker, which follows a START with no STOP inbetween, is meaningless. So is a STOP marker before the first START or after another STOP (with no START inbetween).
2007-04-13: New release 0.5.4! This release corresponds to revision 25 of the subversion repository. Compared to the last release, it contains lots of bugfixes. Thanks to all DVBCUT users who contributed.
2006-09-04: DVBCUT development is more active than it might look like on this web site. Thanks to those users of DVBCUT who are becoming active developers. To make DVBCUT more like a proper open source project, I created a subversion repository on sourceforge. (See the download page.) I also created a new mailing list, dedicated to the further development of DVBCUT. Go to the mailing list page to subscribe to DVBCUT-devel.
2005-12-16: New release 0.5.3! Apart from bug fixes, it adds the possibility to reduce the size of the video image display to 50 or 25 percent. For details see the changelog.
2005-12-11: New release 0.5.2! Some bug fixes and lots of new features. DVBCUT now supports AC3 sound. When exporting the video, you can choose which audio channels to include. Apart from the libavformat (a.k.a. FFMPEG) program stream and transport stream multiplexers, DVBCUT comes now with its own multiplexer, which should produce DVD compliant program streams. Please be aware, that the DVBCUT multiplexer is still subject to testing. However, it might be a solution in situations where libavformat gave muxing errors. Version 0.5.2 has improved usability: most notably, there is now a "Recent files" menu. IMPORTANT: I need help for solving a common build problem: on some systems, necessary .h and .cpp-files are not made from the Qt user interface files (.ui), although the correct SCons version is installed. I have no idea what the reason is. If you encounter this kind of problem, please contact me. Please include information on the SCons, Python and Qt version you have installed.
2005-11-27: New release 0.5.1! It contains small fixes and improvements of the useability. Now it comes with the needed parts of FFMPEG, which should ease the installation for many people. Please read the new installation notes. A Debian package is now available, too.
2005-11-23: I have set up a mailinglist on sourceforge.net. You can subscribe to it here on this website, just click on "MAILINGLIST".
2005-11-22: I will need more time to prepare the next release, as there are some uncompleted changes. To get rid of the critical memory leak in version 0.5.0, just replace the file src/lavfmuxer.h of the DVBCUT sources with this file. I believe there is even one more memory leak, but it is less critical because the amount of lost memory is not so big. Some more information about the upcoming release: version 0.5.1 will be much easier to compile because it will include the parts of FFMPEG that are needed. I also plan to introduce a proper build procedure, based on SCons. This will change the build dependencies: libavcodec/libavformat is no longer needed, libao will be optional, on the other hand SCons must be installed.
2005-11-22: IMPORTANT. I became aware of a memory leak in DVBCUT which causes it to crash when saving long videos. (Actually the video written to disk is kept in memory.) I will provide a bugfix release tonight (CET).
2005-11-21: I'm delighted to announce the first public release of DVBCUT. You find a source tarball of version 0.5.0 in the download section. I also updated the web site and added more pages to it.
2005-11-20: I'm still preparing the initial release of DVBCUT. Expect version 0.5.0 within the next few days. Today, I implemented the MPEG program stream parser. Now DVBCUT can work on both transport streams and program streams as input. Another new feature is the "show difference" display mode, which---as the name suggests---makes DVBCUT show only the differences between the a given picture from the video stream and the current picture. Imagine, you want to cut out a commercial break from a tv programme, and you want to get rid of the repetition of a scene after the break. You can precisely find the right picture to cut, by selecting one picture before the break and then finding the identical picture after the break. Look at the screenshot.
2005-11-20: Launch of the DVBCUT website on sourceforge. It's far from being complete, actually its still quite a construction site.