Help... H.264 .ts files

I've just recently upgraded my TV Capture card from Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-T Stick to PCTV Systems nanoStick T2 290e, whenever I record it generates a H.264 .ts file, however I need a bit of guidance concerning free software to edit (for rendering to another format, or YouTube) H.264 .ts files. I try uploading a .ts clip to YouTube, but rejects it saying it can't convert.

I'm using DVBViewer software btw

Google search .ts to .avi or Bing search .ts to .avi

I don't want to convert it to .avi though, as that will lose the quality (x264, MKV preforms better for HD caps)

That isn't very helpful in this case. There is a lot of terrible video editing/converting software out there.

I use a combination of Avidemux and WinFF, although I can't vouch for them being able to open .ts files as I have never tried. They are both free and available on Windows and Ubuntu.

I have also used Handbrake on a Windows machine at work and that seems okay too.

The best advice I can offer in this situation is to use VLC to convert them to high bitrate MPEG2 for editing. I think VLC can also change the container from ts to mp4 without re-encoding the video and audio streams, which may play better with YouTube.

Couple of things.

Beware that Freeview HD uses AAC audio not AC3 or MP2. You may have issues with some packages coping with AAC sound as it is newer and less widely supported.

When it comes to editing and re-encoding - it really does depend on what you need to do and how user-friendly you want to get. Interlaced content can be particularly tricky if you want to convert to another interlaced format and preserve full motion rendition.

Also off-air recordings can have errors which can cause major audio sync slippage if not properly handled.

I've had mixed results with various solutions to do different things (but I'm using DSat stuff which has AC3 not AAC audio).

I'm probably missing what you're trying to do but I know in WinTV you can select and option to automatically convert .ts to .mpg.

Basically, before I upgraded I used to be able to record MPEG2 directly from DVBViewer and either convert it to a format I wanted, or edit the MPEG2 and upload directly to YouTube, which I was hoping .TS H.264 would be the same, however I'm quickly discovering its slightly more complex. I'm not quite sure if the version of WinTV I have on the computer accepts with H.264 TS.



Thanks, ah I see, that might explain why the AAC was stuttering in VLC player.

You may not find VLC that great for HD content unless you have quite a lot of CPU grunt or have a recent VLC build and DXVA enabled for hardware GPU acceleration (and a GPU that does H264)

You really have to decide what wrapper you want for your H264+AAC (or transcoded) audio :

MP4, MKV, MOV, m2ts etc.

MPG isn't suitable as that is a simple MPEG2 programme stream wrapper for MPEG2 video.

You have an MPEG2 transport stream containing H264 video and AAC audio streams on separate PIDS (possibly two audio streams as the audio description feed may be there as well)

TSMuxer and TSRemux can be useful for some remuxing, analysis and stripping out stuff you don't want. MKVToolnix can be useful for remuxing as an MKV.

I don't do much re-encoding as I want to retain the original quality.

Go get Handbrake, knock yourself out.

AVI is just a container format though, able to handle virtually any video format from lossless to heavily compressed, and you can quite happily use a H.264 video compressor within an AVI file (in fact most of the online file converters do just this - write an AVI file header and then just stick the existing data in). Doesn't help at all if the other programmes don't understand the video format used (I have some software for generating AVI files for timelapses - internally it generates an AVI file containing MJPEG data, which while VLC will happily play it, Windows Media Player throws a strop and crashes).

AVI is quite a nasty container though - increasingly less liked.