Extracting HDTV MPEG2 stream

[encoder]

Does anyone know of a good program for extracting the HDTV MPEG2 stream in batch mode from the .tp file generated by BTV4 when using the FusionHDTV card?

I basically want a tool that generates .mpg file so I can use WMP to play it. Currently, I can only use VLC which I don't really like.

.e

[karhill]

Windows Media Player will play .tp files (as produced by BTV). The problem is getting WMP to play the correct subchannel if you have a multi-subchannel transport stream. HDTVtoMPEG2 will strip out the subchannel of interest. But running that from the command line, I'm not sure if you can specify subchannels... and how do you automatically get the subchannel from BTV?

But I'd be interested in a list of good tools to convert a .tp transport stream to a standard MPEG2 stream.

[PVRMan2]

Fusion provides a tool within its suite of software that comes with the card that will do the conversion quite nicely. You can actually change the size, bit rate and audio rate also. Seemed to work fine for me.

[karhill]

Originally Posted by PVRMan2

Fusion provides a tool within its suite of software that comes with the card that will do the conversion quite nicely. You can actually change the size, bit rate and audio rate also. Seemed to work fine for me.

I've had problems with the Fusion converter tool on some files, problems usually associated with audio sync problems with the resulting MPEG program stream. I've also used HDTVtoMPEG2, which is a nice freeware program. It has about the same success rate as the Fusion converter program. They both seem to fail on the same files.

The best .tp to .mpg converter that I've tried is VideoReDo, a commercial program. I've had files that failed to properly convert with both the Fusion converter and HDTVtoMPEG2, but converted fine with VideoReDo. VideoReDo is marketed as a direct MPEG2 non-linear editor. It's significantly slower than HDTV2MPEG2 at converting a transport stream to standard MPEG2, but it seems to be more successful in the tough cases.

So if I had to rate them from best to worst:
1) VideoReDo
2) HDTVtoMPEG2
3) The converter program that comes with the Fusion software.

[GGoodrum]

Is there a program out there that will easily convert the .tp files to WMV format? What I would like to do is create wmv 9 files (1280x720, 5mb VBR...) that have smaller file sizes than the .tp files, and then download them into a laptop remotely.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by GGoodrum

Is there a program out there that will easily convert the .tp files to WMV format? What I would like to do is create wmv 9 files (1280x720, 5mb VBR...) that have smaller file sizes than the .tp files, and then download them into a laptop remotely.

Just changing a *.tp mpeg transport stream to a *.mpg mpeg program stream is a relatively quick process. The actual video format isn't changed. It's a "trans-coding" method rather than an encoding method. It should take minutes. The job is trans-coding an mpeg from one form to another that is still an mpeg.

IE. mpeg transport stream to mpeg program stream. You are always in an "mpeg" world = fast.

However if you change any parameter of the mpeg (ie video frame size,) OR you change the mpeg to something other than mpeg (ie from mpeg to divx, etc) then the whole mpeg has to be re-encoded from scratch. Depending on the power of your computer this could take hours.

So if you are dealing with a final rendition of WMV, that is going to require a complete re-encoding of the original ... from mpeg to *.wmv. It all depends very much on how powerful your computer is. For example, I have a dedicated media editing machine that will re-encode your typical one hour mpeg program stream down to a home theater quality Divx in about 15 minutes. Any time you can get your encoding down faster than 1x you are doing good.

[karhill]

Originally Posted by GGoodrum

Is there a program out there that will easily convert the .tp files to WMV format? What I would like to do is create wmv 9 files (1280x720, 5mb VBR...) that have smaller file sizes than the .tp files, and then download them into a laptop remotely.

Well, after you convert the MPEG2 transport stream to a standard MPEG2 program stream, you can showsqueeze it with BTV.

I'm not sure why BTV doesn't offer the capability to automatically convert a .tp file to a standard MPEG2 program stream.

[ThickHead]

Haven't tried it myself yet, but you might want to try ProjectX over on Doom9. It's free and says it converts transport streams to program streams:

http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/Dig...-fullguide.htm