HD to DVD: Removing commercials, Demux'ing with ProjectX
I recently posted an article telling you briefly how to tune and snag content from a pcHDTV HD-3000 (perhaps HD-5500) tuner card. Today, I'm going to talk about processing the transport stream a little further to get ready for transcoding down to standard DVD resolution.
First, download Project X. The project originates from Germany, so any web page with documentation has been translated and can be sparse. You may wish to Google for the subject. However, the download includes sufficient information on how to build and compile (build.sh or build.bat). I have my install running on Linux, though there's little to stop you from running it on Windows. Also, fortunately, it isn't too picky on what flavor of the Java SDK you have installed. (Some Java-based apps tend to require a certain version of the Java SDK).
Once you've downloaded and compiled, you'll navigate to the source directory containing the built ProjectX.jar file. To execute, simply type java -jar ProjectX.jar. The initial GUI loads up.
Near the bottom of the previous article, I explain on how to dump the file into a .ts file. If you're using azap be sure to use the -r command line option as I described and leave azap running.
With ProjectX running, you open this .ts file by way of the "File" Menu.
Once you look at the GUI, you'll see there's a lot of options - we're only going to use a small percentage for what we're going to do. Be careful changing default options for this first exercise; you may confuse the situation. You'll notice in the above image that I have a yellow arrow pointing to a "plus" and "minus" button. That's how you insert markers for removing commercials. Any content marked in red will be dropped from the final demuxed files. To the left of the marker buttons you'll have some navigation buttons. These can be temperamental on High Definition content; you may not be able to navigate to a specific frame as you desired. Don't worry if you see "error decoding frame". It may take a little patience getting used to inserting markers, so be prepared to spend a few minutes dealing with this.
Once you've marked commercials to your satisfaction, you're ready to open the process window - as marked by one of the arrows in the picture below.
Make sure "Action" is set to "demux". Click the green "play" button to commence processing (highlighted by a yellow arrow). You'll see the process window display a lot of information, don't worry if some warnings show up. One of ProjectX's strong points is its ability to compensate for errors within the streams. This part of the exercise is relatively quick (1-5 minutes).
Once the demux is complete, you'll be left with a few new files: a text log file, an m2v file (video), and an ac3 file (audio). At this point, you may be able to branch off from my instructions and use the transcoding tool of your choice. There may be a few negligible HDTV resolution to DVD resolution annoyances I'll go over in my next post on this subject, so check back.
Before I go, I'll mention a52dec. Some transcoding applications may not recognize the ac3 audio output of ProjectX src. In my case, I'll actually use a wav downmix during the video processing and then swap the original ac3 file back in while rendering the DVD image. To create this wav file, use a52dec with an instruction like a52dec -o wav infilename.ac3 > outfilename.wav.
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