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Cuttermaran is my favorite freeware video editor. I didn’t find the need to demux recordings prior to editing to be a problem and learning to use it was fairly easy. In its normal edit mode, where cuts begin on I-frames and end on either I- or P-frames, it worked great for recordings made using my set-top video recorder, and was sufficiently accurate for my purposes most of the time. In its normal editing mode, it was also wonderfully fast and used little hard drive space beyond what was needed for the file containing the cut.
I was disappointed with the encoding mode, which allows cuts to begin or end on any frame. Documentation/guides indicated that only a few frames would be re-encoded. Based on that, I thought the process would be fairly quick, and not take up much room on the hard drive. However, this assumption wasn’t true for any of the freeware encoders I tried (QuEnc, HCEnc, Mpeg2enc). I don’t own a copy of TMPGenc that handles MPEG2, so I can’t say whether or not it works differently.
When using the freeware encoders, .AVI files containing the entire cut were created prior to re-encoding, and the bitrate of the final .MV2 file containing the cut was different from the original. The first time I tried the encoding mode, using Cuttermaran’s default settings for encoding, the process took about 2 hours for 22 minutes and some odd seconds of video (half an hour of program, minus commercials), and used gigabytes of additional hard drive space for the .AVI files. After that, I tested only with 2 or 3 minute clips. The resulting video looked good, but the time and hard drive space required is a big drawback for me
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