| User review:
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This is, to be blunt, an extremely baffling and somewhat user-hostile piece of software, and not the most stable in the world either.
However, it's still got a 7/10 from me, because, much like the worst car in the world being far better than no car at all so long as it gets you from A to B faster than any other practical and affordable option, it is basically unique. One of those tools that will need to be recreated entirely from scratch sometime in the future if there's still a need for it, a new OS kills compatibility with this one, and the original developer doesn't reappear from their 5+ year hiatus to update it back into life.
If you have a need to quickly scrub through an MPEG1 or 2 transport or program stream in order to visually find a place to coarsely cut it apart at a GOP boundary, possibly marking off several such cuts to form "keep" and "delete" areas within, and indeed do so whilst simultaneously concatenating two or more files of matching specification together, then export the result with no other modifications whatsoever (even to the audio stream or timecode...), then this is your guy.
It's Fast (constrained basically by HDD performance - it's slow but acceptable over a 100mbit network connection or using a USB2 drive, pretty quick with an internal PATA-133 or cheap SATA platter drive (or external USB3), and absolutely blazing when given an SSD to play with),
...Efficient (does exactly what it says on the tin and little else, even the UI comes straight from the VBA "minimalist" parts bin - so the EXE is compact and everything runs quite quickly, and doesn't chow huge amounts of memory, though you have to guess at a few things; it also allows you to dynamically alter how much disc bandwidth it takes up on a proportional basis, from really quite slow and not really noticeable, up to full-throttle-no-prisoners, to avoid network bottlenecks or effectively locking up the system should something else swap-hungry be running at the same time, as well as deliberately taking the opportunity to monopolise everything and go literally as fast as possible if given the permission)
...(mostly) Reliable (haven't had any serious problems with output files that can't be traced to corrupt original data, though the coding maybe isn't as stringently clean as it could be so closing and reloading between each edit session is recommended... only takes seconds)
...Easy to use touch-type style with keyboard shortcuts, [i]once you've learned them[/i]. Has a rather pro video workstation feel when you're doing that.
...Based around a simple context; video file(s) come in, you mark off the breakpoint(s), then save either the current marked segments, or all those that have been added to the decision list so far, either as separate or one combined file.
...Flexible and future proof - it can handle some pretty stonking great files, and has no issue processing ludicrous monster MPEGs, e.g. from a capture device scheduler going wrong and recording 10 hours instead of 1, on otherwise low powered hardware. 30 or 40gb monolithic files run through it on a 2gb RAM machine pretty much the same as 300mb ones, just taking longer to scrub through to find the piece you actually wanted.
...Has hidden depths ... seriously there's all kinds of buttons and menu items that I literally can't fathom. OK, that's probably more one for the "cons" pile rather than the "pros", but it hints at there being other interesting things you may be able to do.
On the downside, as mentioned, it can be a little unstable, and either slow way down or just crash entirely once the memory/resource leaks build up too much (which seems to be a function of opening and closing too many files in a session, rather than anything to do with file size or number of cuts). It's not dangerous, I've never yet seen it damage an input file, though generally you do have to delete the current output, (force-)close and re-load the program and job. For my own use, as I typically do fairly simple trim jobs on smaller files, save multiple shorter sequences out of the huge ones, and only occasionally glue multiple input files together (eg where a capture crashed during and ad break and I happened to be present and could manually restart before it ended), and the processing parts tend to take up the bulk of the time (they may be "fast", but that doesn't mean they're [i]short[/i] ... it's more fast in the sense of a bullet train or jet plane), it's no particular inconvenience to load it up empty, drop the next input file into the window, cut out and save the parts of interest, then close it (and do a bit of interstitial housekeeping like deleting the original file(s), setting up the output files for further recompression etc) and open a new copy a few moments later in order to do the same with the file after that one.
It really is no-frills, the progress bar is pretty basic (and can hit the speed display cap on SSDs!) and there are various things you're left guessing about or having to keep track of mentally. A few extra frills MIGHT be nice. Including more descriptive button labels. It doesn't even really deal with video acceleration properly - my old 2006 XP laptop (which has been relegated to capture, cutting, and network filehost mule) actually switches to Basic theme (with a complaining popup and a split-second of blank screen) every time the program loads and then back to normal when it closes, because of something to do with how it addresses the screen (not sure if that's because it's trying to use an outdated 9X / 2K method, or something pioneered in Vista?)... I should probably just set it to basic permanently but it's become part of the character of the thing ;) ... The lack of native acceleration doesn't seem to harm the performance appreciably, other than reducing the video panel update speed and causing it to tear a little, but the machine struggles to display full DVD resolution material sometimes even in a normal media player, so it's not a huge slowdown. The actual navigation and processing tasks don't seem affected at all and, as previously stated, run pretty much as fast as your source media is able to provide the frames (NB trying to process material from or to a really slow drive is a pretty bad idea - it won't hang, but you'll be waiting a hell of a long time, and whilst there's a way to control how much of the link and computer power it takes up, generally it's hard to do much else with the machine at the same time. EG a very slow memory stick, or a Humax PVR over ethernet, or both from and back to a very slow memory stick plugged into the front of that PVR...)
Plus on that front, if you want to do pretty much anything other than splitting and/or joining MPEG files, and performing a very limited range of other very basic processing tasks on them at the same time ... use another program. Either before or after feeding the file through M2C2. It's about as close to a Unix command-line applet designed mainly for other programs to pipe data through without human intervention as you can get whilst still running under Windows and being an interactive, graphical app. It does two or three things, quite well and with no flab, and that's it.
And, well... it's an enigma, and can be an unforgiving one (thankfully merely in terms of work built up in the current session rather than deleting things). There's no help file or readme to speak of, what instructions exist are pretty cryptic and seem to be for an entirely different version, possibly in a different language, and pretty much you have to wing it at first, moving the cursor slowly around the toolbars, sliders, status bars and menus in order to see what barely-informative tooltips appear. A good working knowledge and experience of digital video concepts and other time-served, austerely laid out and keyboard-happy video editors with a preponderance of grey and squares in their design (virtualdub, DGIndex, etc) will serve you well. There's a bit of guesswork and a bit of "well, if I wanted to do {task} in {other program which does it at a higher level with different file formats}, I would hit {key combo}... I wonder if it works here...? {Ah, yes it does / Oh crap, no, it doesn't, what the hell is happening now?}" involved.
I've used it extensively for dealing with less-than-perfectly timed files produced from the same laptop's PCMCIA (remember that?) analogue capture card connected to a half-dead Thompson PVR (it can't record worth a damn any more, but it can at least change channels to a schedule) and using the card's equally bare bones and even less reliable scheduled recording system. On a good day, they just need the fluff of preceding / following programs trimmed off (and, for non-BBC channels, the adverts cut out), which depending on channel and how much of a guard time I was able to leave could end up removing more than a third of the original data. If things go a bit wrong and the scheduler plays up after a recording had started but before it finishes, or I had to resort to manually hitting the general purpose Record button (either before dashing out to work, or collapsing in bed), so it either stops by my hand or when the disc is full, there could be an hour or two of actually wanted programming ... stuck somewhere in the middle of a 10, 12, 15+ hour file. No-one wants to archive that entire thing, and most other editors would make your life hell trying to extract it, and you'd have to reencode too, even though the capture file is natively DVD compliant (save for a bit of workaday remuxing) and has closed GOPs. So long as there is, or I can make enough space on the drive for the extracted useful data of the smallest capture file on the disc (or can at least temporarily dump the output to a USB or network drive), then M2C2 doesn't care very much (I think it gives a warning if there's less than 1GB left? Certainly if there's not enough space overall) and I can gradually chip away, discarding the unwanted fluff from the files and keeping the good stuff, rapidly seeing the free space increase until there's enough room to tackle the biggest files. It's pretty easy to have that laptop perched near the old PVR with a wireless keyboard connected (not even mouse!) and do a minute or two's rapid navigating in between the longer save sessions whilst doing something else on the newer laptop or a phone/tablet (book... dinnerplate... watching TV... optimistically setting up the next day's recordings...) the rest of the time. There's only really about a dozen keys that are really important (back/forth fine or coarse, speed modifier keys (between one-GOP-at-a-time upto jumping about 90 seconds in one go), go to start or end, start/end section to keep, add section to edit list, remove last section added, save current, save all separate, save all as a joined file... and of course, quit), several of them are shared with the Windows Explorer navigation keys, and it proved surprisingly easy to set up M2C2 as an "open with" shortcut, so it can all be done basically one-handed with hardly any wrist movement except for the save and quit commands.
Seriously, it's been a lifesaver for this sort of thing. Maybe you could call it an unhelpful enabler, but I wouldn't have been able to realistically record quite a lot of things (including many, at one time, needed for a workplace project) without a great investment in other equipment, instead of being able to repurpose old drek that I already owned. And even then it may not have worked in quite as straightforward a manner. I mean, I've tried to use Avid Studio before... it's horrible. Don't think I actually even managed to do anything beyond saving a short clip from a connected camera, without sound, in the wrong format, after a couple hours of prodding at it and using the manual. Linear, effectively nondestructive (should be entirely possible to chop out the "junk" parts, save them separately, then paste everything back together and have it appear essentially as the original file) editing of existing files? Probably would have taken a month to work up to.
However, I still don't know what a lot of the options do. I can't even get the "play video from this point" function to work properly. Have no proper way to tell whether files are saving as interlaced or being mangled into progressive. There's an occasional bug where the overlaid video image is misaligned with the actual program window to a greater or lesser extent and it's almost impossible to get it to go back to where it should be short of restarting the computer (turning off ALL video acceleration - rather than it just being busted down to basic DirectDraw or whatever it uses - SOMETIMES works, along with fiddling with the zoom, aspect, and letterbox crop settings ... which all feels rather like waving a bundle of magic reeds around to appease the video gods). And if you then use the output files on a DVD or for network playback without SOME kind of basic re-encode or healing video analyser being passed over them first (or at least setting the DVD structure up so it quietly skips the actual start/end and the points where the file was split) there might be the odd small visual or audio glitch for a fraction of a second whilst everything re-synchs. Worth it to not have to toss about with Avisynth or re-encode every frame of every single goddamn thing, however, and the only people who'd actually care too much about the occasional hiccup in an MPG file ultimately produced from a DVBT stream are those who have even less life than myself.
So yeah, it's a one-eyed man in a world of the blind. Take its hand and forgive the occasional issues of poor depth perception and asymmetric peripheral vision, because, hey... it can see, and is willing to be your guide.
And, well, if you can do any better, do it yourself (...I mean, please, make an updated version that's easier to comprehend and lacks those little bugs). I might have a go myself, but I can't code and really don't understand the finer points of the MPEG file structure well enough to feel confident futzing with it. |
