OK, I have read and read and read and now my eyes are red.

I have captured using an ATI 7500AIW card to mpeg2. I have captured at various lengths, bitrates, framerates, resolutions and whatnot. The capture looks fine (mostly) Now all I want to do is edit out the commercials and stick the file back together. The recommended tools were Tmpgenc and virtual dub. Neither of these two progs will open the mpeg2 files.

Just to let you know what I am trying to achieve.

Capture from vhs using composite video
Remove the commercials
When the resulting file is played back it must not look "Blocky" when in full screen mode.

I have 25 gig of space on an ata100 drive on an ata133 controller. Celeron 1.7, 512DDR on an Asus board with the Sis 533 chipset (p4S533)

The system is running XP. The ATI stuff is the latest and greatest - 7.7

What am I missing? (apart from large chunks of sleep and hair!)

Just to add... virtual dub says "Mpeg import filter:pack synchronisation error."

Tmpgenc says cannot open or unsupported.

Premiere 6 will import the file - but no pictures but the sound is ok...

Ulead studio 5 will open it but for the life of me I cant figure out how to make the editor work... all the tutorials I have found refer to 6 and I guess they put a bunch of different buttons in...

Windows Media player and ati file player will play the file.

I can't believe its this difficult just to delete a few minutes from a mpeg2 capture!!

BTW in mpeg1 format I can do it all - but because the input quality aint that great the output in mpeg1 is not really usable, but the mpeg2 quality is good enough for my purposes.

TMPGenc will open MPEG-2, at least the last time I downloaded it that was true, but a large number of people who have used it for editing have reported terrible audio sync problems after doing so. Not everyone has this problem, but many do. Virtual Dub won't touch MPEG-2 video, although I have read of a hacked version that would handle it. Never tried it. The best editor, in my opinion, is MPEG2VCR. http://www.womble.com. It's not
cheap ($250 US), but it is a great product. Rich has some instructions on how to use it at his web page of http://www.pcphotovideo.com. As far as blocks go, that is dependent on your bit rate. No blocks? You better be using a really high bit rate. MPEG2VCR won't introduce blocks into your video, but if you are recording at SVCD bit rates, your goal is probably not realistic as you are probably going to have some blocks in everything you record. It's just a question of whether you can live with it or not.

>>>>TMPGenc will open MPEG-2,<<<<

Yes this is the bit I understand... so why won't it?

As to the other problems which are all related to me attempting to make a silk purse out of a sows ear - I was just filling you in on what I was trying to do and telling what I had already got working.

Found it at vcdhelp - RTFM!! or RTFFAQ's anyway!!

Adding the Nimo codec pack cured it.