Muxes, Codecs, Transcoders

[zehd]

Side question:

On other threads, especially the Mux Catalogue thread, people are trying out different muxes, namely the CyberLink muxes...

If a mux simply takes what comes down the pipe and wraps it into a container (CyberLink = MPG) then what would be the difference in one version over another...?

[sub]

The containers contain there own special types timing information etc, which used during playback to allow determination of file lengths, skipping etc, so these types of things vary with the different containers.

[mvallevand]

If a mux simply takes what comes down the pipe and wraps it into a container (CyberLink = MPG) then what would be the difference in one version over another...?

You have it backwards, a mpeg2 ts file has the program stream audio/video wrapped in the the data payload so it actually gets unwrapped. Error handling would be one factor, but there are lots of the variations in the ts control headers controlling what to extract where software would important

Sub also mentioned the timing information and unlike your analog recordings that start at zero and increase based on your clock, as ts file can string together different timelines. A mux that simply extracted the ps data without adjust headers could produce unskippable files.

Martin