# 'Chop' function



## seal.rock (Jun 3, 2016)

My suggestion: Implement a simple way to save a small section of a broadcast, while erasing the rest. Occasionally I would like to save one minute of a broadcast that is an hour long - say you were captured on camera at a baseball game and wanted to show your family and friends or there is one song from a a music festival you really like and want to save. This would allow you to free up space, not having the save an entire hourlong broadcast for the one minute you actually want. I could probably free up about 15% of my hard drive right now if this function existed.


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

You could always transfer to a PC, edit using VideoReDo, then transfer back to TiVo.


----------



## caughey (May 26, 2007)

Assuming you can transfer to a PC. 

It would be useful to have a delete-before and delete-after option, but I don't expect it.


----------



## Jonathan_S (Oct 23, 2001)

Dan203 said:


> You could always transfer to a PC, edit using VideoReDo, then transfer back to TiVo.


Or if you have two TiVo's; and a lot of patience you can also crop pieces out using the transfer function. (Trimming the beginning is easy because it offers to start the transfer copy from the current pause point. Trimming the end is harder because you have to manually watch until enough is transferred then cancel the copy).

But it _would_ be nice if TiVo just offered a simple built in trimming function, even if it likely couldn't be frame perfect (because it requires re-encoding to be frame perfect on a front trim).


----------



## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

With H.264 trimming the front can be problematic without recoding. Most MPEG-2 streams have closed GOPs, which means you just have to back up to the nearest I frame and make the cut there. However H.264 mostly uses open GOPs which means that even if you back up to the nearest I frame it may not be a safe cut point. There is an SEI flag they're suppose to use to designate which I frames are safe, but in our experience broadcasters mark all I frames with this flag even if they're not safe. They don't care if there is a bit of pixelation after you tune a channel they just want the tune to happen as quickly as possible so they use the flag incorrectly.


----------



## xxsj (Jun 21, 2016)

caughey said:


> It would be useful to have a delete-before and delete-after option, but I don't expect it.


This. I'm sure the UI for this would either be too easy to access accidentally or take time to achieve unfortunately.

It would be great to at least delete before a given skip marker or after the beginning of a skip marker


----------

