Export Video on a Mac

#1

Looking for advice on exporting recordings to a smaller size and cutting out the commercials using a Mac. I would love to keep captions if possible. I know that people with a PC are using MCEBuddy.

What are people using on the Mac?

Some scenarios I was thinking about were:

  1. Handbrake. Encode with Handbrake. You can manually cut out the commercials at the beginning and end of the recording but not the commercials in the middle. You also lose captions.

  2. Handbrake + Quicktime Player. Encode with Handbrake and then use Quicktime player to manually trim the commercials. This is very time consuming. You also will have to encode the video twice.

  3. I saw another post outline transcoding and comskip. But this may be beyond me.
    Newbie Comment and Question

#2

Mac Mini 2018 with Big Sur. I use Avidemux to manually edit commercials as well as the beginning or ending extras. Learning curve on Avidemux was tough. Closed captions are retained. The “saved” file is .ts format. Just rename to .meg.

#3

Thanks for your response. What settings do you use to save in Avidemux? There is a setting for video output, audio output, and output format.

#4

I save the .meg file from Channels to my desktop. Drag and drop the desktop copy into Avidemux. Set the View (Zoom 1:2 for most HD video). I believe these were the defaults: Video Decoder Lavcodec RGB, Video Output Copy, Audio Output ( x track((s)) Copy, and Output format MPEG TS Muxed (ff).

Most of my issues were learning how to navigate the buttons in the lower left. My old DVR allowed me to mark segments of the file to be cut as the final edit action. Avidemux requires you to mark the segment and the cut each one individually. When you finish, click on the Save Video in the upper left. The save file has a .ts extension. I rename to .meg and move to an additional store disk. Then delete the original file in the default Channels recording drive.

Have fun!

#6

I was able to use Avidemux to cut out the commercials and saved the file using "copy" for both Video and Audio Output and "Mpeg TS Muxer" for the Output format. This saved the file without encoding it and preserved the closed captions. This took about 2 minutes.

Then I used Handbrake to encode it using Apple 720p30 preset. I unchecked "burned in" on the subtitles and used "H.265" for the video encoder. This took about 50 minutes for a 42 minute video

The resulting .m4v file looked good on Appletv, cut out the commercials, and was 1/5 the size of the original file.

1 Like