When I do a "lossless" transcode to ditch the commercials, I get kind of weird output. Most importantly, Media Player Classic can no longer detect the video stream. This is really weird, and probably an mplayerc issue, since VLC and WMP both play it back just fine. I'd be interested to fix it (I have mplayerc configured "just so" with keybindings and such) but it's not a dealbreaker if there's nothing I can do. It also *seems* lower quality, but it could be that there's been some interlacing issues all this time and I'm just now going looking for trouble. Is it possible that quality goes down even with the "lossless" transcoder, or is my brain playing tricks on me?

Your brain is playing tricks on you. Lossless only re-encodes a handful of frames around each cut point. If you keep your cut points close to key frames this is minimized further. The rest of the video information is passed through as is..

The sound issue is real and I periodically see it in DVDs made from recordings, but far less often than I used to. I'm not sure whether to attribute that to better practices on my part (recording settings, cut list editing, ...), improvements to the software, or both.

Ghengis, I agree with tjc on the lossless encoding only working on a few frames.

On the other issue about quality of the playback video.
I too have noticed that various playback software on other platforms give differing results. I believe this is related to how the software and it's corresponding codecs handle the same video.

I found on my windoze box the VLC player always seemed to produce the crispest, cleanest results.

Most recently I have been using mythtvplayer. it seems to produce a nearly perfect reproduction of the recorded stream on the windoze platform.

A search on here turns up these results:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... thtvplayer

I thought there was another thread I found it from but anyway as always,

ymmv

I haven't tried it with "lossless transcoded" videos, but I have found that mplayer does very reliable playback on windows, and has the skip-forward / skip-backward functionality. I've had success using it for

1. Hidef mpeg2 recordings in TS container

2. sdef mpeg2 recordings from a digital source in TS container

3. sdef mpeg2 recordings from my PVR-250 in PS container.

4. sdef xvid files in avi container.

You can download a pre-built version for windows at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html


Marc