dvbcut is a Qt application that allows you to select certain parts of an MPEG transport stream (as received via Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB) and save these parts into a single MPEG output file. It follows a "keyhole surgery" approach where the input video and audio data is mostly kept unchanged, and only very few frames at the beginning and/or end of the selected range are re-encoded in order to obtain a valid MPEG file.
dvbcut needs to create index information on an MPEG file first. Therefore, when loading an MPEG transport stream file, it also asks you for a filename of an index file. If you choose an existing file, it is loaded and used as index if suitable. (That means, that dvbcut performs some sanity checks on the index itself and also checks if the index describes the chosen MPEG file.) If you select a file which does not yet exist, dvbcut creates the necessary index in place.
After opening the MPEG file, you can navigate through the video by means of a linear and a log scale slider. While the first represents the whole video, the latter enables you to precisely select frames close to the current frame. At any place in the video, you can add START, STOP, CHAPTER and BOOKMARK markers. Markers are shown in the list on the left. With the START and STOP markers you determine what parts of the video you want to write to a new file. dvbcut starts at the first START marker and proceeds until it encounters a STOP marker. If there are more START markers after that STOP, it will continue at the next START marker, and so on. Every START marker, which follows a START with no STOP inbetween, is meaningless. So is a STOP marker before the first START or after another STOP (with no START inbetween).
