This repository is based around my backup of my Star Trek: The Next Generation BluRays. It primarily contains chapter information that I manually enhanced.

Download this and use the .edl files with mpv to play your local Star Trek files, without ever having to re-watch the intro/outro ever again!

I like to watch Star Trek. It's my kind of ASMR while working or having a nap on the couch. Star Trek is a mostly quiet SciFi show, perfect for unobtrusive background noise.

However, the intros are very, very loud. And if you're binge watching, also kind of repetitive. But most importantly they are distractingly loud, with the Enterprise swooshing and zooming through space and the music swelling more and more in the background.

To add insult to injury, Netflix's intro-skip functionality was, for some unknown reason, set to jump 2 seconds before the end of each intro, right into the loudest part of it.

So I was looking for a way to auto-skip the intros and outros and so I built this.

• Buy the Star Trek BluRay box sets.
• (optional: cancel your Netflix subscription)
• Use MakeMKV to rip every disk to your storage of choice. This leaves you with 1 .mkv file per episode.
• Use Handbrake to shrink down the video files to save on storage space. Make sure Handbrake keeps the chapter information in the video files.

Now you have all episodes with the original chapters, set by some guy/girl somewhere at Paramount. Each episode has a number of chapter markers, but there is one important marker missing: the beginning of each intro.

So I manually went to add this marker to every episode:

• Use lossless-cut to open each file.
• Nagivate to the moment the intro starts.
• Split the current segment. Name the first part "Chapter 1" and the intro part "Intro".
• Rename the last segment to "Outro".
• Enable audio waveform in lossless-cut and zoom to the beginning of the outro segment. Ensure that the chapter does not start later (~ 30 episodes in total had such outros, where you would hear just a half a second or so of the outro). I manually moved the outro beginnings forward in those episodes a bit.

This left me with 1 .llc file per .mkv file. All of these are in losslesscut/.

I then hacked together a bunch of Go programs that took these llc files and converted them to Matroska chapters (see chapters/matroska/). These were then embedded into the .mkv files, so now every episode has effectively 1 additional chapter marker (for the beginning of the intro).

Another Go program then generated .edl files, one per episode, that instructs mpv, my media player, to skip over the unwanted segments.

And that's it! Now instead of adding the .mkv files to my playlist or double clicking on them, just use the .edl files instead. And enjoy Star Trek even more :-)