Weird issue with some recordings

[sub]

So I'm wondering what the tv channel feed would have to do with the duration not being tagged on a local .TS file (your item #2)?

It's not uncommon for players to misreport the duration of .ts files recorded from digital broadcast tv. How accurate the duration will depend on player, and what the broadcaster is doing in the stream.

There is no "duration" information stored in a .ts file... All through the file though, there is timestamps on the audio and video data. A basic player often looks at the first and last timestamps in the file, and assumes the duration is the difference between the two. Unfortunately that is not always true, since broadcasters often reset the timestamps mid stream (like when they've spliced in other video content, with a different timestamp range). Some players just report a duration of zero if the end timestamp is smaller than the start timestamp.

More sophisicated players consider these timestamps, but also look at things like the bitrate and size of the file to make a best guess of duration.

NextPVR is just recording a bit for bit copy of whatever the digital broacast contained, including timestamps. When you run it through tsmuxer, you're effectively rewriting the timestamps from the broadcast with newly calculated timestamps.

That said, most broadcasters a pretty good with this stuff, and broadcast a nice monotonically increasing timestamp. If you're seeing these types of issues often, it's likely your broadcaster isn't as well behaved on this front.

[qualsite]

I've had similar problems, but the ts files always play fine on my computer with VLC or MPC-HC, but some programs will not cast properly to Samsung media player or through Plex [will not fast forward, time not correct, unable to locate correct play point, and audio out of sync]. Since they all play fine on the computer, the file must not be corrupted. My old Argosy media player used to play everything fine, but it died, and now I can't find anything that will consistently cast the ts files via the Samsung, Chromecast, or other methods. Don't have an answer, but it appears to be a similar problem, for which I could use some suggestions.

[scJohn]

I am no expect on casting. That said, these casting programs are designed around the assumption that the video is using MPEG4 and will always be a perfect stream. None of which you can depend upon 100% in a ts file. Somewhere in the casting software that ts file is being transcoded to MPEG4 and the audio may also be transcoded. VLC and MPC-HC, along with WMP, can play you ts file using MPEG2 and will be more fault/error tolerant when play the the file.

You might want to consider transcoding software. Take one of your exisitng ts file and transcode to an mp4 file and try casing that as an experiment. If you are a heavy user of casting, then that might be the way to go.