How to join videos without re-encoding?
 

say i have a retail dvd.
i demux the audio & video from it.

i also have an OTA (off-the-air) recording of the same show/movie/whatever.
i demux this as well.

there are some sections, from my OTA recordings that are not on the retail release.

what i want to do is cut those missing bits from my OTA recordings and "join/add" it to the retail version in the appropriate places.

what tool will allow me to do this and not re-encode the resulting video?
i don't want to erode the quality of the retail video if possible.

or if re-encoding cannot be avoided, then which tool does the least harm?

thanks.

Joining video clips can only be done if the specs of the videos match.
In the case of MPEG-2 video, the specs must be "close enough" to coexist within the flagged MPEG container.

So ... run a Gspot analysis for me. See http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-analysis.html

From that, I'll know if it's possible to merge as-is, without a re-encode.

My gut feeling says you'll have to re-encode at least one clip. Given that retail source is better for encoding abuse, it would likely be the clip that needs a re-encode. Then it would match the homemade piece, and you could merge in a good program like Womble MPEG Video Wizard.