Can you share a 100M+ excerpt or 2 on a fileshare?
I wrote the vdr-convert script to transcode .vdr files to .ts format for the same reason, and to compress MPEG2 .ts vdr files to H264/5, also importantly to retain the AD and subs streams properly *in sync*, all using ffmpeg. And I wanted the results to be standard and compatible with vdr 2+ and 3rd party players like smplayer, vlc etc. It's possible, not so easy.
The .vdr conversion turns out to be a lot harder than most people think a) because the subs stream was split over multiple packets in a nonstandard private stream in .vdr files (even though they are dvbsubs), which them needed to be reconstructed, and b) you need several tweaks and bug workarounds for ffmpeg.
Stock ffmpeg particularly doesn’t like DTS timestamps missing in subs or worse messed up in A/V streams due to broadcasters chopping up the files and not rebuilding them properly, I've seen some of that.
Anyway, in all the messing around / patching ffmpeg, I built a little experience of 'broken' files for conversion. If I can remember, that might help.
Richard
On 11/01/2025 17:50, Marko Mäkelä wrote:
Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 09:53:13PM +0100, Frantisek Rysanek wrote:
I got some video files in MPEG PS format.
Have you tried VLC ?
Sorry, I should have been more explicit. I thought that when I ask this on the VDR mailing list, it would be clear that I would like to play such files in VDR, by selecting them from the Recordings menu, or from a menu that is generated by a VDR plugin, similar to the DVD plugin which I remember trying some 20 years ago.
Yes, VLC is great for playing various files, including the two forms of recordings that VDR generates (001.vdr for MPEG PES in older VDR, and 00001.ts for MPEG TS). But I would like to play the files not on a general-purpose computer, but on my VDR box, that is, a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 via the rpihddevice plugin. The GPU firmware is capable of decoding the video packets. With a multi-terabyte SSD, it makes a very compact and silent "video jukebox" system.
I'm not very fluent in the various container formats... could it be that the file is really in a "transport stream" format, maybe with a limited/filtered subset of PID's ?
The files that I would like to play back are not in MPEG TS but in MPEG PS format. As a test, I converted one of them into an MPEG TS container (ffmpeg -i file.mpg -codec copy 00001.ts). FFMPEG complained about some missing timestamp information, and VDR indicates that there are several errors per second. The playback seemed to be fine nevertheless.
It would be great if there was a way to make MPEG PS containers appear in a VDR menu so that they could be selected for playback. I know that I could convert the MPEG PS files to slightly malformed MPEG TS files, but I would like to avoid that step.
Marko