Re: How to play MPEG PS files?

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