Why TS Containers?

[jayjayuk]

Just wondered why TS containers are used, as opposed to say, mkv or something else?

I have had allsorts of issues with HD TS containers, for starters XBMC and VLC both have their own issues with them, and no doubt others....

Is there potentially some plugin that could be written to write mkv containers instead? just wondering.

An example of some of the common issues..

Apple TV won't play the HD ts files using hardware decoding, and according to the XBMC team never will
VLC media player won't take a HD TS stream and re-encode it for restreaming

These above 2 issue alone are reason enough a mkv option?

Thanks for reading

[Rob van der Does]

TS is a transportstream; it contains the complete (demuxed) stream as has been transmitted by the transponder. Any other way of storing the stream would require re-encoding, which can't be done on a STB.
But the good news is: many players can handle a TS once it has been renamed to .mpg

[Trial]

Hi Rob,
just to use mkv re-encoding is not necessary. The video stream can be the same but all things must be remuxed.

ciao

[jayjayuk]

thanks for the replies.

Another question then, why is the metadata stored in a seperate file? :confused: i think this is the cause of most issues i'm facing

any way to have the meta data stored in the actual container???

[Trial]

Hi,
the meta data is in a separate file for easy access. Without this file a large part of the recordings has to be analyzed and start of media player would be delayed.

I think it is the other way round. Because a ts files contains several kinds of extra data a lot of simple devices have problems with ts. ts contains EPG, SI, teletext, subtitle and perhaps transponder list. I did not watch a movie with XBMC for a long time but I am quite sure it worked before. Also my HDI Dune Prime 3 has no problems with TS and he can even use FF and FR.

ciao

[m404]

it does work to watch (!) the TS streams with XBMC ... the issue is, that because of all that extra "junk", it is uncapable of noticing that it's actually hardware-decodable, and will only software decode it, making alot of thinclient XBMC players useless for HD streams coming from an enigma/tuxbox STB ...

honestly tho, I've always felt like that is a flaw on XBMC' side, and not on the enigma side ... if XBMC choses not to pass on the videostream to the hardware decoder, then that's that, and there's nothing that the STB should do about that ...

unfortunately, it seems like XBMC folks don't use STBs and therefore they don't care :S