What video player has an accurate frame count or a precise timestamp?

Question

I have a number of WTV video files (Windows Media Center TV Recordings) that I have recorded. WTV is just the container, but the video codec is usually MPEG-2 or sometimes H.264.

I would like the edit the commercials from these files, however most of the available commercial detection software is not accurate enough for my purposes or requires too much tweaking to work reliably. I would like to manually determine the start and end points for the commercials, however the video players I have found that are compatible with the WTV format do not provide enough granularity in the time or frame numbers to identify specific points in the video in which to cut.

In short, I'm looking for:

• Media Player able to play WTV files
• Able to display timestamps with precision in the range of ~10's of milliseconds (0.01 seconds) or able to display specific frame numbers.
• Able to step frame-by-frame in the video
• For a single user, and preferably free but paid software is an option
• Windows-based (Windows 7 Pro x64 is the OS)

I don't need the ability to edit the file or re-encode it, I have plenty of tools that can do that, I just need to know where I have to cut.

Answer 1

ffplay (part of the static builds ffmpeg package) provides timestamps with the resolution that you require and has supported wtv files natively since early 2014, is usable for a single user and is free, and you can use "s" to step forward one frame. Here's a rundown of keyboard commands:

q, ESC            quit
f                 toggle full screen
p, SPC            pause
a                 cycle audio channel in the current program
v                 cycle video channel
t                 cycle subtitle channel in the current program
c                 cycle program
w                 cycle video filters or show modes
s                 activate frame-step mode
left/right        seek backward/forward 10 seconds
down/up           seek backward/forward 1 minute
page down/page up seek backward/forward 10 minutes
mouse click       seek to percentage in file corresponding 
                  to fraction of width

Note: I think you have to launch it from a command prompt to get the xx.yy timestamps in the terminal window

Sources:

http://www.mathewinkson.com/2009/10/converting-wtv-to-mpg-in-windows-7

https://lists.ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2012-November/011135.html

http://www.herongyang.com/Flash/Video-Stream-FFmpeg-ffplay-Interactive-Command.html