[Gllug] convert .ts files to MPEG

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Sun, 2 Mar 2008, michael norman wrote:

> I have a number of ,ts files saved from my Humax PVR 

Those are mpeg2 (transport stream) and so already able to be played by
most tools, you /may/ need to rename to .mpg first is all.

I don't know the specifics of the Humax but I know that many Linux DVB
things save the whole channel stream, before dividing the separate
multiplexed channels in to each separate mpeg.  You might have some
issues just using ffmpeg (which I also normally recommend as a quick
tool to solve this sort of thing normally).  There are tools for
dealing with that anyway.
 
> I would like to convert them to a format that I can then edit out
> the adverts and other bits.  I don't want to make dvds, just be able
> to watch them without the adverts on my pc.

I believe the team that were working on Kino were switching to their
MLT (Mutton Lettice Tomato) framework, which would allow nearest GOP
(Group of pictures) editing of many video formats, such as mpeg.  I
don't know what stage that project got to.  But the normal way of
doing this is to edit raw (or roughly raw) DV.

You can use ffmpeg -i inputfile.ts -target pal-dvd output.dv This will
create a VERY large .dv file which you can edit in many different
tools.  I love Kino as a video editor, very easy to use, but can use
vi keys for the power users out there.

Once edited, special effects created etc.  You can export to DivX or
mpeg4 or to a DVD format for writing straight to disk.

Another possible option is GOPchop, which can edit some mpegs
directly, but I've had little success with this.  I was able to do it
on one special mpeg I found.  I believe I'd need to reencode stuff
anyway before I could even use this.  Or perhaps extract a/v
separately (lossless) and mplex them back (lossless), but this takes
hours of effort.

Another lossless option is to note the advert times as you whiz
through the video in a player like vlc, xine or mplayer.  Then create
a dvdauthor xml file, when you encode against this it losslessly
copies only the parts of the video yuo request, in to a new mpeg.

These last two lossless options are a lot of effort 1st time round in
the Linux world.  Might not even be possible in Windows/Mac, but then
it's also possible that somebody did a nice clean GUI based point and
click for achieving the same.  Of course once you've scripted your
edit tool, you can quickly do this over and over in the cmdline UNIX
world.

Personally I can rarely spot any loss in quality from multiple
re-encodes, especially if I'm carefully using -sameq (ffmpeg tries its
best to maintain the "same q"uality, even at a sacrifice of bitrate),
or encoding to and out of, very large formats, such as DV.
 
> Googling suggests some Windows apps that might do it, can anybody
> suggest a Linux app I might use for this ?

Some windows tools work under wine.  I've used DVDshrink for
reconstructing DVDs that wouldn't play in my domestic player but could
still play on the PC, but that I wanted to watch on telly in the
lounge.

 - Damion
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