Using mkvmerge to cut deadwood from transport streams?

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Sometimes, there are films that I want to keep longer. In the past I have used mkvmerge to cut out the extra from the beginning and end of the file. Ie:

mkvmerge --split parts:00:00:50-02:35:30 “Syriana.ts” -o “Toppy/Syriana.ts”

This no longer works and osmc errors out:

12:44:07.853 T:2790257648 WARNING: could not find codec parameters for nfs://192.168.1.110//home/dalton/Videos/Toppy/Hamlet liikemaailmassa.ts
12:44:07.864 T:2790257648 NOTICE: CVideoPlayer::OnExit()
12:44:07.906 T:3025940480 NOTICE: VideoPlayer: finished waiting
osmc@osmc:~/.kodi/temp$ tail kodi.log
12:56:35.936 T:2515530736 NOTICE: LoadJpeg: unable to load http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/sFpGI08aeHIRKlLi9SxLyYrRyZ8.jpg
12:56:51.192 T:3025940480 NOTICE: VideoPlayer: Opening: nfs://192.168.1.110//home/dalton/Videos/Toppy/Syriana.ts
12:56:51.193 T:3025940480 WARNING: CDVDMessageQueue(player)::Put MSGQ_NOT_INITIALIZED
12:56:51.202 T:2553279472 NOTICE: Creating InputStream
12:56:52.157 T:2553279472 NOTICE: Creating Demuxer
12:57:05.641 T:3025940480 NOTICE: CVideoPlayer::CloseFile()
12:57:05.644 T:3025940480 NOTICE: VideoPlayer: waiting for threads to exit
12:57:22.237 T:2553279472 NOTICE: CVideoPlayer::OnExit()
12:57:22.281 T:3025940480 NOTICE: VideoPlayer: finished waiting
12:58:56.962 T:3025940480 NOTICE: NFS is idle. Closing the remaining connections.

Any ideas why? Copying the file as is works.

2

You could try avidemux for cropping videos. Works well and saves file without need reencode. Supports lots of file types.

3

I use mkvtoolnix gui on Windows for this task. It works well and preserves the dvbsub subtitles present in the broadcast TS stream into a MKV file. Kodi is happy to play the resulting MKVs with proper support for dvbsub subtitles.

As an aside, both VLC & avidemux don’t currently support dvbsub subtitles in a MKV.

Avidemux is handy though to get the exact timings of the I frames.

4

OK. But the point is that the stream will not even play. It used to work in the past. I will investigate avidemux, but I much rather have a simple command line utility.