Multiple TS files (HDTV) and playback - Is there a way yet?

[Colmino]

Subject sort of says it all. For literally years now, high-definition programming has been acquirable in vast quantities. I have never seen the material presented in any other format than .TS, with the lone exception of a specimen of WM9 video. There is the occasional happy event when the .TS file is one single, giant file clocking in at over 10 gigabytes. This is indeed happy because it is such files that I am able to successfully play from beginning to end without any real complications.

But most of the time, what one instead discovers is that the material has been split up into segments of 100 megabytes each. And I have never found a piece of software - not even the great Zoom Player Pro - which can play these files in batch, seamlessly, without pauses between each.

It really seems to me that since HDTV content is almost entirely available only as multiple .TS files, there really ought to be many solutions, including the most obvious, ie a piece of software that *gasp* can actually play them seamlessly without any sort of preparatory steps. There pretty much has to be. That's why I'm asking. Meanwhile, a couple of things I have tried:

1: Copying the files together manually. This actually seems to work at first. When I copy two files together, the result plays fine. It's when I copy the whole thing together that suddenly no player can do anything with the result.

2: Combining the files using "HDTV to MPEG2". This purports to be a piece of software specifically designed to convert the .TS files into an MPEG2 file, or files. The documentation does not mention whether or not this happens to include, as part of the package, a redundant re-encoding, but I assume not. Nonetheless, I have never actually had this piece of software spit out something that any player has been able to do anything at all with. And even if it did suddenly start working as advertised, this is a step which I would like to believe is automatically redundant; there really has to be a player that doesn't require one to combine thirteen gigabytes worth of files into one.

Anyway, thanks in advance for whatever turns out to be the definitive answer.

[waheed]

Try using VLC Media Player. Ive found that it can play the file you suggested in 1.

[ChrissyBoy]

" Copying the files together manually. " always works for me... Try TSJoiner (at the bottom of http://www.svcd2dvd.com) which puts a GUI around the copy /b command.

[Baldrick]

hdtv2mpeg2 works fine here, to copy to one single ts and it works in all my mpeg2 players with the hdtv pump filter.

vlc media player can play splitted ts but it's a pause between each.

[aedipuss]

if you choose the output type as ts, not mpeg in hdtvtompeg2 it will reassemble all those 100mb parts back into one ts.

[Colmino]

Well, I can only reiterate that I've tried the two file-joining options and have met with essentially zero success.

Copying (/b) the files together seems to stop working correctly if I try to splice more than the first couple together. I have no explanation. None of my plethora of media players are able to recognize the resultant file. This has happened with over 12 different movies.

I have also given "HDTV to MPEG2" a few tries with different movies. Each time, what it has produced has been a file which really confuses my media players. What most of them do is "play" the first ~5 seconds of the video (without successfully showing any actual video - just a black screen) and then stop itself like I'd clicked the stop button. Attempts to seek directly to the middle of the video cause the players to simply not play anything nor even attempt to.

It totally baffles me how these options have been used with apparent success by other people when every single time I have used them, the results have simply not worked.

Yes, I do present the files in their sequential order. In addition to using a batch command like "copy /b *.ts file.ts" I have painstakingly specified each file, as in "copy /b file0001.ts+file0002.ts+file0003.ts" etc. Same unusable results. According to other forums I have read, people are in great disagreement over whether this function should even work, and indeed, my own results suggest that they don't, or are highly unreliable.

Of course if somebody ever managed to develop a player that could properly handle multiple .TS files, this facet of the discussion would be mercifully irrelevant.

[Colmino]

if you choose the output type as ts, not mpeg in hdtvtompeg2 it will reassemble all those 100mb parts back into one ts.

I had been using version 1.07, which I'd acquired from what I had assumed to be the homepage, so I hadn't even seen such an option. Thanks for the tip. Trying a combine now to see how it goes.

[Colmino]

No dice. I can make a 1GB chunk that plays fine. But once I've made the whole file, no media player likes it. Tried with three different movies now.

This inexplicable lack of results is the reason why I would strongly prefer a piece of software that doesn't require this sort of headache to be undertaken. Why do people post 100MB .TS files in the first place, if there's nothing out there that can even do anything (satisfactory) with those files without pre-processing?

[Colmino]

In an effort to nail down just what the heck is going on with this TS file madness, I have done a series of combines with HDTVtoMPEG2 using different movies originally separated into 100MB chunks.

What I've determined is that there are some TS chunks which no media player likes to play. They are not common. Parity checks confirm that the files are not corrupt. If any of them are passed through HDTVtoMPEG2 to create a larger file, the entire file cannot be played in any media player. However, HDTVtoMPEG2 itself has no trouble at all playing or processing the files, so they are evidently perfectly valid TS video.

Does anyone have a guess as to what is engendering this phenomenon, and why no media player likes these TS files when HDTVtoMPEG2 has no difficulties?

[Nelson37]

By what mechanism are these files acquired?

Your HD is not fat32 by any chance?

Sounds like there is indeed some sort of corruption, as often happens in analog captures. SFAIK this is not supposed to occur in digital captures, at least not in the same way. Have you tried any repair options, Restream, PVAStrumento, anything similar?

Is there any pattern to these corrupt segments? Same time frame in video, same segment number, immediately before or after the hour, etc?

[Colmino]

By what mechanism are these files acquired?

Downloaded from Usenet, as is likely to be the case for 99% of all HDTV media on the net.

Your HD is not fat32 by any chance?

Negative, although I probably should have said as much to begin with.

Sounds like there is indeed some sort of corruption, as often happens in analog captures.

To the best of my knowledge, captures posted to Usenet are pretty much always straight copies of digital satellite or digital cable feeds.

Have you tried any repair options, Restream, PVAStrumento, anything similar?

Going by the two facts, 1: that the people posting these files, as well apparently as everyone grabbing them, seem in no hurry to report complications with the video, and 2: HDTVtoMPEG2 also has no trouble playing the supposedly corrupt files, I had chosen to take it for granted that the files are not corrupt. At least, not in a fashion that should be choking media players.

I have just now tried out the two applications you suggested. PVAStrumento did not like the files at all, whether I fed it a "corrupt" specimen or a "non-corrupt" one. The problem seemed to be that it was expecting valid DVD MPEG2. Restream seems to be a reencoding application. I fed it both types of TS file and it spat out carbon copies, and the playback results of these copies were, predictably, identical to those of the original files. Restream seemed not to detect anything corrupt in any of the files.

Is there any pattern to these corrupt segments? Same time frame in video, same segment number, immediately before or after the hour, etc?

Here is the data for one of the movies: Out of 48 TS files numbered 0000 to 0047, I am able to play back (and create larger splices from) files 0000 to 0043, plus 0047 which is only 30 megs large. 0044 and 0045 both cause all media players to sit there effectively forever, attempting to play the file. Prolonged waiting necessitates the manual cessation of the media player task. 0046 quickly returns the error that the media player cannot play the file. There really is no pattern to speak of. If it helps, the movie in question is Duel, posted to Usenet about nine days ago.

[Baldrick]

Downloading copyrighted movies from the net is WAREZ. It includes captured hdtv streams from usenet.

Buy a hdtv card/device and some hdtv channels instead.