Singing Potatoes
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Thursday, 5 October 2006
That can't possibly be right
Jet Engine

While waiting for a server upgrade to finish, I clipped all the commercials out of the season 3 premiere of Lost.

It clocked in at under 25 minutes, including the teaser for next week. I figured I had to have thrown out a couple of segments of show along with the commercials, so I tried again. Same result.

Twenty-five minutes of show. Thirty-five minutes of commercials.

Absolutely fucking pathetic.

Update: It seems it's the VLC media player that's underreporting it as under 25 minutes (24:30 on Windows, 24:42 on Linux). Totem and Kaboodle both report it as being 24:34 long. All Windows apps which use DirectShow report it as 1:00:55. None of them, apparently, are showing the actual length of the clipped video. Weird.

Good thing Zach posted his comments; he saved me from writing an embarrassingly inaccurate complaint to ABC.


Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
Really? It sure didn't seem that short last night.
Posted by Zach on 5 Oct 2006 08:01
According to the iTunes store, it was 44 minutes or so... are you sure you recorded the whole thing?
Posted by Zach on 5 Oct 2006 13:44
hee hee... happy to be of service. That VLC bug has bothered me for a while. What format did you record/edit in?
Posted by Zach on 6 Oct 2006 09:36
The PVR software I use (GB-PVR) records directly in DVD-compliant MPEG-2 format, so it's perfect for burning to DVD without transcoding.

Normally I use TMPGEnc MPEG Editor for cutting out commercials, but this time I gave GOPchop a try. It looks like it didn't reëncode the GOP timestamps (even though I selected that option), since the Windows DirectShow filters are reporting it as the hour-plus-one-minute I recorded it as.

Posted by Godfrey on 6 Oct 2006 10:32