Help with WebVTT or xVTT subtitles with commerical delete and conversion to HVEC

General Support / Questions Commercial Removal
1

Tell if what I am trying to do is possible with MCEBUDDY

I would like to perform post processing on the recordings, the move over to Plex. Here is what I would like to accomplish.

  1. Maintain the subtitles/CC from IPTV like pluto(xVTT). Recording was made with channels DVR
  2. Convert to H.265 and MKV or other container
  3. Using comskip/comcut to remove commercials during the post processing, using the EDL file generated by channels DVR
  4. use GPU hardware acceleration

All this works great except I can’t seem to get MCEBUDDY to extract these types of subtitles and embed back in the converted file. I have a power shell that can do it, it dumps a bin file using ffmpeg, the python to parse out the uncut SRT.

It seems that ccextractor will not find or extract this subtitle type.

Anyone doing this? Do you need pre and post processing scripts?

2

More clues using chatgpt:

This will output the text only:
ffmpeg -i “YourFile.mpg” -map 0:2 -c copy -f data “output.xvtt”

So -map 0:2 -c copy -f data is extracting only the payload text. The timestamps are being carried separately in the MPEG-TS/xVTT packet structure and aren’t part of the extracted bin_data payload.

This will give some kind of packet data:

ffprobe -select_streams d:0
-show_packets
-show_entries packet=pts,pts_time,dts,dts_time,size,flags
-of csv
“YourFile.mpg” > xvtt_packets.csv

Then I ran out out tokens and have to wait. But it says it can:

I can work out the packet structure and give you a script that:

  1. Reads the xVTT data stream.
  2. Reads the corresponding MPEG-TS PTS timestamps.
  3. Associates each caption with its timestamp.
  4. Generates a normal .vtt file.
  5. Produces something Plex/MCEBuddy can use.

The important discovery here is that the caption text is definitely present and recoverable. We just need to preserve/reconstruct the timing rather than using -f data alone.

3

Update: I have abandon this strategy. Just too complicated. Instead I focus on using MCEBUDDY to transcode, remove commericals with EDL file, put into proper folder/filename for plex.

Then I am using bazarr to download SRT and sync with the audio. You must also use radarr and sonarr but it works really well when you get it running. And a VIP subscription to opensubtitles.com for $20/year.

Done.

5

MCEBuddy does support WebVTT and other subtitle formats. It was added recently and it can also synchronize the subtitles to match the commercial cuts.

I will need to see your log files to see what’s going or better yet if you can upload the original video along with the subtitles and also your log file we can replicate it to see what’s going on.