I have a long (20 minutes) video encoded in MPEG2 (I believe), and weighing about 1.3GB. If you're interested, it is the footage from a big concert in which my band performed at the beginning of this month. I want to first of all, split all the different songs into different files, and then upload them to Youtube or a similar site so as to prevent myself from having to send out huge files in many directions.

I've tried many different programs. Windows Movie Maker keeps freezing when I "import" the video into it, probably because it is not used to such large files. Even if it did work, the program is really not easy-to-use for such tasks. VirtualDub could obviously load the file, and could do what I wanted it to do, but it took a bit of tinkering, and in the end when I wanted to export the different sections he wanted to re-encode them, which apart from taking a lot of time, threatened to produce very large files (sometimes a 2 minute section in AVI would take more than the big MPEG2 file). I could not ask it to just use a direct stream copy type of export because it was exporting the MPEG2 file into an AVI file.

So first of all, I want a recommendation for a program that can easily split a large video into smaller videos based on predefined markers. Preferably, it would allow me to keep the MPEG2 encoding that the video is currently encoded with, or allow me to encode it in a format that would be easier and more efficient for uploading to Youtube. I'm sorry I have so many demands, but if possible, I would really prefer this program to be free, and even more so if it was open-source.

Any help will be really appreciated! Thanks, guys!

You can try Chop, a program that 'chops' a file into a few parts for sharing. You can even encypt the 'chopped' files! It is available at: http://www.sinnercomputing.com/Chop.htm

I don't really have any advice if Movie Maker's not cutting it, but I'm still interested in seeing the video! Keep us posted.

Problem is that not many none-professional editing tools will read Mpeg-2 (DVD) format. In fact that takes a $20 plug-in even with Quick time Pro. Your best bet is to load it into a player and then export the files in some other format (like Quicktime Mov) where more editors will be able to read and make changes to the file.

you can split videos with any video editing software.
I have used some of them. Ulead videostudio is one. Moviedv is anotherone I have used.
And Pinnacle is also a good software.
These are not just video editing software but they have a lot more in it.
Free trials are available for these.

This is hardly what I needed...
Not only does it require a monetary investment, it is not specialized for movies and cannot cut a video at a certain frame. Thanks for trying though!


Well, I'm glad you're showing interest. I think you'll enjoy it! Me and my two co-members are working right now on trying to split this video and post it to YouTube, and I might open a thread about it the moment we manage this task.



Exporting it to AVI (which is a pretty standard format) is no problem... even VirtualDub can manage it! But I haven't yet found a program to cut any type of file this big! Do you have any program which can split a video of any type? I will manage to convert it if needed, believe me. I think the greatest limitation here is the cost of the software (preferably none).


The drummer of my band tried to do the task before us with Pinnacle and said it was just too sluggish to work with. Besides, I'm not basing this on any specific experience with any of these programs, but I'm guessing that trial editions will not be able to export more than a limited number of minutes, and will probably have some features disabled. In the worst case it will feature watermarks, which is definitely not good for what we're trying to do.

Thanks for all the help and the interest so far, but we've yet to come to a conclusion!!

re-coding is simply the default value, you simply have to change it.
Go to "video" in Virtualdub, and choose "direct copy". Then go to "Audio" and choose "direct copy".

And then VirtualDub will split the movie without re-compressing it, it goes very fast.

Also, look if there are keyframes in your movie, don't split in a random place, there is an option "go to the next keyframe" in order to choose the beginning or the end of the splitted part.

Sorry for the delay!
Actually, one of my band members somehow managed this, but this is still interesting to me. I tried using the direct stream copy thing in VirtualDub[Mod] but the thing is, the movie is in MPEG2, and VDM exports back into AVI, which can't handle the MPEG2 stream. Is there any other option?