Hi All,

So, I have been wanting to make programming for my TV complete with commercials, PSA's, station identification, etc just like it was back in the day. It would be really fun to have guests over and "watch TV" like it would have been. However, I am unsure of what I would need to do so. For example, I have some Honey West dvd's. I guess I would need some software to rip that into some video format and then splice the commercials in. I don't think that would be called "video editing" software, would it? More like making a playlist but with the ability to prevent "dead air" or gaps in between commercials and what not. Any recommendations for software to do this?

It could be done with video editing software (especially if you want to make a single file that contains an episode with commercials etc added in). Or you could also do a play list.

What I do is use VLC media player and an older PC with a graphics card that has an S-Video out (they made cards that supported them into the windows Vista era and windows 10 still supports some (though win 7 supports them better) ).

A while back my permission to pick things out of the E-waste bin at work landed me a rack mount server with a ~16 SCI/sata hot swapable HDD front bay and 4 PCIex16 connectors (and enough S-video cards to fill them). I've got this crazy idea to at some point build it up into a 4 video output media system and automate it so in concert with 4 BT aglie modulators I can have 4 different stations running whatever I want...

When you use VLC, does it seamlessly transition from clip to clip? I guess no matter what you are going to have some blip when transitioning, if nothing else because the quality of segments is going to vary.

Is there a free/cheap video editing software that folks like out there?

VLC is mostly seamless. I have a HDMI capture device I use for recording current shows off cable (they encrypt their signal so you can't watch their stuff without renting a box) and it splits everything into 30 min clips so on hour or more shows I que up the files into a play list... the only wart is that it shows the file name as an OSD when it changes clips...there may be a setting to suppress that, it doesn't quite but me enough for me to have researched it.

Google best video editing software. Some of the rankings include a freeware catagory. I use Pinnacle which is not free to remove commercials and take the somewhat random 30 min splits on the big files my HDMI capture device makes into split and combine those files into smaller archival copies of the programs.

I've been thinking about this for a few weeks now and it seems like a queue script and structured folders might work while using something like MediaPlayerClassic or VLC to do the video playback and output, preferrably to a video card in windowless mode and from there a media converter to your choice of output format like component, composite or simple RF.

You have one folder with your selection of feature programming, either in full or segmented for commercial breaks in between, Likely the latter so you don't need multiple videos to play at the same time and seamlessly transition. A segment of feature runs, then a segment of commercials, then follows up with the next feature segment.

Another folder contains your commercial segments. These can be whatever really but I assume rips from youtube that are diced up into their 30 something second segments. The script pulls from the folder randomly and plays as many as you want within the scripted commercial segment, but does not allow the same commercial to play twice in the same segment.

A third folder contains station idents, either from old recordings or something you've made yourself. The script queues them either at the beginning or the end of a feature program.

The whole shebang plays like a queue for VLC which plays everything in sequence, dropping to a black screen for the few seconds it takes to switch videos. The script generates the queue in 3 or 4 hour blocks as you cannot modify an in-progress queue, only stop it. You can however read from it at any time. So another script can scrape the queue and generate short "up next" videos to drop into the commercial block folder and delete later to save space.