Using VLC as a TS microscope ?

[alex22]

Hello,
I want to be able to extract individual keyframes at or near a given offset in a transport stream file (for example to choose cut-points for a simple TS editing tool). I suspect I could do this from an external program remote-controlling VLC. Could someone tell me the simplest method ?

Alternatively, a simple standalone executable extracting still images from a TS on stdin, would also solve my problem !

Thanks in advance,

-Alex

[The DJ]

VLC is not a frame based player, so you cannot do this with VLC.

[alex22]

OK, maybe my description was too restrictive.
What I'm really after is a simple, transparent cutter for transport stream files: a kind of GopChop, but for Windows, and possibly with a cruder interface. Knowing the structure of transport streams, I basically know how to cut them, I just need to know the offset corresponding to the point in the movie where I want to cut. Then, the idea is to write a small tool (let's say a Tcl script) which chops out small chunks of the TS and sends them to a slave vlc for viewing (even if the pictures are not completely still it's not a problem).

In between I've seen that VLC takes URLs starting with UDP. So may be I could use this route to send my chunks (too bad Tcl has no native support for UDP). I would appreciate a direct pointer to the spec of the payload in this case.

-Alex