Works on NextPVR, not XBMC

[w84no1]

You are lucky, I am trying to get it to work on a PI and on my phone so I can have TV everywhere in my house. Guess I will post my video on the XBMC Forums and see if they have any suggestions. Thanks for the help.

[mvallevand]

I don't really like the quality of playing h264 on my RPi either but I think that is the box itself not the files.

Martin

[longjohn119]

It's never really a very good idea to store recordings in Transport Stream format which is inherently full of errors (And error correction signals which probably confuse the player) Why would you want to save data with errors in it? What I do and this works better than 9 times out of 10 for me is I use ProjectX to demux and correct timecodes and other errors in the transport stream and then I use Imago MPEG Muxer to put them in an MPG container (It'll also correct some timing/audio errors too). If you are going to do any editing of commercials and such now is the time, you'll have better sound sync especially important if you do convert them to h264 or another format for your handhelds. For editing MPGs or even raw TS files. I use DVB Cut which although isn't maintained and isn't fancy gets the job of editing out commercials quickly and the indexing it does when you load it keeps sound sync issues from popping up in the edited recordings. This indexing will also correct errors but can also take a long time to index on a recording with a lot of errors so running them through the 1st two programs saves time.

I'm using pretty much the default settings on both programs but there are some other error correction schemes you can enabled for the Tweakers out there. ProjectX will do batch demuxing, just drag and drop folders and hit the start button. The Imago program unfortunately doesn't do that but it only takes a few seconds per hour long show to process. Once your library is converted over any new recordings take just a couple of minutes to process after they are recorded. All of these programs are free and easily found with Google.

Summary: Transport Streams are inherently full of errors so it's Best Practice to correct these errors before archiving so your players don't have to try to do it on the fly. It's also a good idea to correct these errors before any format conversion is done. Trust me you'll eventually get back every minute you spend doing this and then some by not having to track down playback issues that are often (usually?) due to uncorrected timing errors in the recordings themselves

[gEd]

For achieve purposes and prior to conversion, I agree that cleaning the .ts is a good idea (I use TS Doctor).
However AFAIK, Project-X does not support H.264 content nor can the MPEG container store HD. For H.264/HS content, people need to use TS Doctor or Videoredo H264 (Quickstreamfix) and create a new .ts file or mkv/mp4.

[mvallevand]

There is no magic in using mpg (mpeg-ps) files for archiving unless you are dealing with old players that don't like the format but they probably don't like h264 either. Long time members may recall problems with timelines in the the h/w encoding on the PVR 150's and other quartz.dll issues. The main difference from today's capture is that the capture card generated the timecode because it wan't part of the raw analog data. My HDPVR HD recordings have very good timecodes and typically pretty good transport streams.

The biggest challenge with broadcast capture is quality of the signal, and you should always strive to have the strongest signal. If you have glitches and gaps in the recording they can next be fixed, just removed and it will be perceptible. The next is the timecode and you could have a another perfect signal but the broadcaster changes the timecode for a commericial, a new show, every 24h. Nothing is wrong with them doing that live tv ignores it, but it can play havoc on a PVR where you want to navigate in the file. Several methods exist to improve playback at the source capture I don't have recent experience with VDR and MythTV but they used to separate the elementary audio and video streams as it recorded and it kept it's own timecode. The xbmc client reads this with a proprietary format, although some MythTV purists want it more like a true MythTV player. Microsoft uses .wtv file with their own time codes, and NextPVR uses its Timing.Info file so there are ways around some problems.

Since this is about xbmc though typically it is not a good mpeg-ts player and that is why NextPVR plays the files and NextPVR isn't what I consider a good general ts player either, but it knows what it records. mpg-hc is the best on Window IMO and it will play pretty much anything pretty well.

Sometimes you can improve xbmc playback with a couple of free tools. ProjectX is good for some streams but overkill most of the time

- cleaning out some extra data from the stream with ffmpeg -acodec copy -vcodec copy or a TS4NP
- remuxing with TsMuXer can rewrite timeline.
- remux to mkv format does do a bit of the first too.

The best thing to do is get samples to xbmc forums so someone can fix their player. That is how sub does it and it works well and then you will be able to enjoy your archived recording for a long time with a minimal amount of work.

Martin

[w84no1]

I don't store my files as transport streams, but I have to use transport streams for live TV. That is the problem I am having, XBMC doesn't play live TV either with NextPVR or Mediaportal as the backend.