On Tuesday, 30 May 2017 at 11:32:21 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
> So unless you know that every I-frame is an IDR in your sources it is not advisable to use them as cut points.

I'll assume that Sociomantic doesn't have the original video source.

Pretty much what Marco Leise said.
While video packaged for internet streaming will have IDR very regularly (between every 2 to 10 sec for example), there are a lot of technical hurdles.

Anyway, multiple video reencodings aren't as bad as it sounds. You are basically capped to the lowest bitrate it was encoded with, but subsequent higher encodings.
The typical football match being broadcast has been encoded sometimes thrice over the full chain, albeit with high bitrates.

Youtube has low bitrates but manages to do well with it, which means one can upload a higher bitrate to Youtube which means on total

For this reason cutting fragments of H.264 would not really achieve anything against the following solution: keep the same resolution, same chroma subsampling than the source you have, no framerate change, and upload to Youtube a remixed video _with a higher bitrate_.

Youtube will reencode anything you upload it to anyway. Multiple encodings are much more objectionable with sound.

On Tuesday, 30 May 2017 at 11:32:21 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
> Ok, but even then your source material would ideally have to be encoded with the same codec and parameters. A different resolution would not work, while a change in frame rate is tolerable.

 I agree, however when VirtualDub barfs, it then goes down to hacking and hex editing the container to trick it into working, this is something i haven't done yet, so i don't know how well it works, if there's sync issues, etc.