Using VideoRedo To Manually Remove Adverts

A big part of of my Media Center life is movies.  From films ripped from DVDs to epics recorded from Freeview, I am an inveterate collector.  Because I also am also mildly obsessive when it comes to organisation, I like all my films in one place, enjoying the same functionality regardless as to whether they came from TV or from ripped DVDs.

Everybody has their own solutions to the ripping and organisational questions, and their own favourite tools.  In this series of articles, I’m going to be explaining my approach to movie heaven.  Firstly I’ll be looking at what I do with films recorded from TV.

Media Center is great.  You can build up an impressive collection of classic movies quickly and easily thanks to the variety available through the UK’s Freeview terrestrial broadcasting network combined with the usually excellent EPG.

But what to do with those films once recorded?  Some may pop up in the Movies strip, some may remain resolutely stuck in the Recorded TV folder.  Others may make the move, but end up with the wrong meta data and – horror of horrors – the wrong artwork.

Making use of the excellent MyMovies allows one to organise ones’ movies and also easily apply age restrictions (much to the annoyance of my 13 year-old daughter.)  I’ll cover how I use this tool another day.  However, even when organised one is still faced with the age-old dilemma of recorded TV – adverts and the few minutes of buffer needed at the start and end of a recording.

If you’re like me, you want your film to be as close to the original as possible.  This means snipping out those adverts and bringing the start of the film to the start of the video file.  To do this, I use a commercial application called VideoRedo TV Suite.

VideoRedo provides a number of services.  As well as a graphical interface for viewing the timeline of a video file for purposes of editing, it also supports a number of video formats including the all-important DVR-MS and a somewhat flaky implementation of WTV.  For this reason I generally convert my WTV files to DVR-MS before beginning the editing process.  In a later article I’ll discuss how I ripped a number of blu-rays to DVR-MS using this tool (and the limitations I encountered.)  I will also post a full review of this handy tool.

Using VideoRedo, I can easily snip out the offending parts of the recorded TV video file, or join multiple video files together (like, for example, when a film is interrupted for a news break.)  There is a tool built in to do automatic commercial detection but personally I’ve found those not as reliable as my obsessive nature demands.  In the past I’ve had identical issues with tools such as DVRMSToolbox and so prefer to manually remove adverts to ensure nothing is left in or removed accidentally.

Once done, I can take the ‘cleaned’ DVR-MS file saved from VideoRedo, create a folder for it on my movies drive and move it there.  I create a directory for each film for the benefit of MyMovies and also as somewhere to put alternate versions of the file (for example, MP4s for my iPod or Windows Phone 7.)  Saving as a DVR-MS file also ensures that my Extenders will be happy playing it with all the navigation functionality I’m used to in Media Center.

Within the MyMovies Collection Management tool I can manually add the film and ensure I have the correct meta-data.  I tend to point MyMovies at the film itself rather than a specific folder to avoid problems once there are multiple video files in the same place. 

And that’s it!  A film recorded from TV, cleansed of adverts and buffers, and appearing in the right place with the right artwork in Media Center. 

At this point I have to mention the ‘c’ word.  In this case, Copyright.  You should make yourself aware of the copyright implications and restrictions in your own region before undertaking this kind of work.  Somewhere to start (in the UK) is http://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law.

I hope this has proved useful.  Next time I will look at moving this content to iPods and Windows Phone 7 devices.