DS Filter for on-the-fly TS repair?

[HDVidiot]

Hi everyone,
I am wondering if anyone can point me to a DirectShow filter that is capable of repairing Transport Streams (TS) that have embedded errors, especially clock errors. Something along the lines of mpeg2repair, but as a DS filter -- but the only important part is the clocking.

The reason: capture from a crummy cable signal -- HD channels and broadcast channels are high quality, but SD cable, and especially SD encrypted cable channels, have lots of errors in the TS. (Thus, not a system/bandwidth/etc problem; seems to me to be a conscious decision by the cable operator as to where to apply their bandwidth.) Resulting TS files are unwatchable (for SD cable channels), but work great after repair with mpeg2repair or VideoRedo, etc. (Problems are so bad for some channels that the Nvidia TS demux will happily BSOD the system.) I have plenty of cpu power, thus would really like to scrub the TS on the way in, rather than post-process....

Thanks very much in advance,
-frank

[Soopafresh]

That would be nice, but the problem you'd face is that the TS file is open while you're capturing, so you can't do anything to it until it is closed. The only workaround I can think of is to capture in segments - maybe 15 minutes at a time, then process those files while you're still capturing - a job better suited for a Core2 Duo or higher.

You can also try a different player - VLC is very forgiving with the TS files I throw at it.


Oh, and if you want to speed up your repair process, save the fixed file on a different PHYSICAL drive than the source file - that way one drive is only reading and the other is only writing- much less CPU intensive and easier on your drives.

[HDVidiot]

Thanks for the reply.

The time the repair process takes isn't the issue; that it is a step at all is the problem. I would very much want to clean up the stream as a stream, before it reaches a file, thus the desire for a filter.

Your mention of VLC gives me an idea: perhaps demuxing, decoding and recoding with a muxer and codec that is error-resistant would do what I want? Does anyone have a review of various codecs out there for error resistance??? (Lots of codecs talk about speed/performance, but I have yet to see one advertised with error immunity - but for my application, that seems to be the most important quality....)

-frank