Hi there,
I purchased Smart Cutter because I want frame accuracy when removing ads from TV movies.
First I tried SC (running on a Mac Pro under 10.8) with a downloaded HD movie from my online tv recorder.
The show was in an AVI container but is h.264 encoded. Plays well in VLC. Trying to open the AVI did not work.
Ok, used ffmpeg to quickly change the container without reencoding (for i in * ; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -f MP4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy "${i%.*}.mp4" ; done)
Check the new MP4 in VLC - ok.
Can now open the show in SC and cut it. The cutted and saved MP4 outputs no sound in VLC but a audio stream is shown in the list, hm...
Now pushed the cutted MP4 again through ffmpeg to crop the black bars and to resize the HD show to high quality SD format.
Trying this SD movie in VLC: Ouch, terrible quirky sound!!!
Going back checking the download show: Ah, the audio stream is MP3. For a TS stream or most MP4s it should be AAC.
Converting the show again from AVI to MP4 copying the video but converting the audio from MP3 to AAC (for i in * ; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -f MP4 -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac -q:a 100 -ar 48000 -ac 2 -async 50 "${i%.*}.mp4" ; done)
Open the newly converted MP4 in SC, cutted it again (the saved cutting list from the prior version did not work and caused a crash).
The cutted saved file has now audio in VLC as the from here converted SD file.
And now to the point from the subject: Smart Cutter works - or not. There is nothing between.
If the input file is in a format that SC eats: fine. If not it crashes or simply don't load it.
Why the hell can't there be a message like "Please check the audio stream - it seems not to be a suppoted format. It should be AC3" or anything like that.
Instead you get (mostly) a crash and have no clue why! So (I think) many users get the idea this software doesn't work well.
It DOES work well, but only if you feed it with the right data formats...
And even if the format is right (the saved cut list) it crashes. Here also the software should be more robust and instead a crash you should see something like "It seems the movie has changed - this cutting list does not work anymore"
Greets... Mac'n'Cut