Feature request: auto-generate chapters for cut points

Hello matrixi,

Thank you a lot for clarification.
We will discuss the possibility to add this feature with our team and possibly add it to Video Splitter's next releases.

Im not sure i got what you asked. Normally you set intput markers to delete unnecessary segments. Or you meant something else?

No, sorry, I'm not talking about Video Splitter's UI. I'm talking about video chapters for the exported video output. It's an XML file embedded in MP4 or MKV that basically sets up bookmarks for the video track. You're probably getting a bad translation of the term, because I'm sure you must know what I'm talking about. They're used by every single DVD, Blu-ray, or even most YouTube videos.

Anyway, if you ever used MKVToolNix GUI, you may know the idea. MKVToolNix also has a merge option to append multiple video segments (similar to Video Splitter's Batch Manager), but in its settings there's a ~"Generate One Chapter per Each Appended File" option, which automatically creates chapters at every single merge point for the video output. So for example, if you merged three 15-sec long segments into a 45-second-long video, it would generate two chapters at <ChapterTimeStart>00:15:00.000</ChapterTimeStart> and <ChapterTimeStart>00:30:00.000</ChapterTimeStart> to indicate the beginning timestamps for both appended segments.

What I was asking was whether that was something you could do in Video Splitter as an optional "Generate Chapters at Cut/Merge Points" setting in "Save Media File As..." So, for another example, if I took a video and cut out a segment at 00:01:20;05, it would generate a chapter file with <ChapterTimeStart>00:01:20.288</ChapterTimeStart> for the moment in the video where the segment was cut. If took a precisely 1-min long segment and appended another one to it, it would generate  <ChapterTimeStart>00:60:00.000</ChapterTimeStart> at the merge point, and so on.  It should be pretty easy to do, since you already have the timestamps for the markers and it would mostly be converting the starting cut's marker time format from 100ns units into the hh:mm:ss.ms chapter text. For video containers that support chapters (MKV, MP4), the generated chapter file could be automatically merged into the container. For those that don't (AVI, MPEG, etc.), the chapter files could just be generated as separate XML files and placed next to the output.

I sometimes make dozens, if not hundreds of cuts in a single project, and the ability to quickly jump and test the output at a cut point is pretty essential. You may want to make sure that there are no issues with the audio (some cuts occasionally result in audio bugs), or that the cut doesn't include any unwanted frames, or that there are no visible problems with the video in case of non-keyframe cuts. If you think you could add at least some basic support for this in the future, I'd grab a Business edition while it's on sale right away. Thanks.

Hi martixi,

Thank you for you question. Im not sure i got what you asked. Normally you set intput markers to delete unnecessary segments. Or you meant something else?
anyway ifyou want to keep the markers you set up, save them within the project. when you reopen saved project you see all the input markers there.
I hope it helps.

Hi, I just checked your Video Splitter software and found it to be almost perfect for my needs. However, there's one big question that stopped me from buying: I didn't see a way to mark the cut/merge points in the output video. So if an input had dozens and dozens of markers, finding each cut point to check the quality of the final output would be extremely time consuming at all times. If you plan any further updates, can I purchase a license now and realistically expect that you will consider adding auto-generated chapters at cut and merge points at some foreseeable future, or is it something that you have no interest in adding at all?

A more minor point, I noticed that some of your encoder/decoder libraries like FFMPEG don't seem to be using their latest up-to-date versions. Do you occasionally update them to get the latest features, or are they modded too heavily to receive such updates? Thanks in advance.