Hi everyone,

Being the owner of a digital television receiver unit with a hard drive (reminds me .... must update "PVR for the video guy (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/totem-poll-totally-off-topic-everything-media/475994-pvr-video-guy.html)"), I can pull the recorded files over the network across to my computer.

These files come with a .ts extension and are in fact the actual transport stream data that is streamed in digital television. The PVR simply dumps it to the hard drive (if needed) and plays back as required.

These are mpeg2 long-GOP video files and will play in software such as "Media Player Classic (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/)", but are a sub-variant of mpeg2 and hence won't natively play on the PPro timeline. (Disclaimer: I haven't installed my CD5.5 upgrade yet. Still on CS2. Currently organising new editing computer.)

I could always play it through Media Player Classic, out through my Matrox breakout box, and record in to a deck for capture back in to the computer via firewire ... bit this is actually a slight bottleneck for the quality of the video. And it takes 2x real time.

Does anyone have some suggestions as to how the file could be re-wrangled in to a proper mpeg2 video file that would place on the timeline directly?

Andrew

I think what might work for this is the Direct Show Dump Utility. It decodes the Tivo format to something Premiere can edit -- might work for your files as well.

Link to preferred / official download location?

Andrew

Sorry, don't have the link anymore. I think I just Googled around a while until I found it. Should have kept it handy, sorry.

I'd stumbled across "Project X (http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x/)" (written in Java, free) when I was researching the extraction of caption data from .ts files and had a go at using it to fix .ts files for playback on the timeline. Couldn't get my head around the software in order to make something happen, though other users reported success. The existing tutorial was for an older version with a different interface ... so it was very hard to follow.

I've tried a copy of Rec&ts2mpg converter (http://www.rastervect.com/purchase.htm#rec) (30 day trial, $15 paid) and whilst it converts to a mpg file that media players can play, it's no good for playing on a Premiere timeline. The files won't import reliably, and you get a screen full of red macro blocks every second or so. Not a good result at all.

What I've had a bit of success with is "HDTVtoMPEG2 (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~balazer/HDTVtoMPEG2/)" (free) which has worked almost perfectly. The file list preview window in Premiere has a corrupted display of the contents/preview, but when you place the file on the timeline it plays perfectly ... which would be the important part. This could be the solution we need, but I'm open to what others may find or have discovered.

Andrew

You might also like mpegStreamclip, also freeware (Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows (http://www.squared5.com)) which is a swiss-army-knife tool I find indespensible, opens practically anything and can convert to mpeg, avi, quicktime, ts, etc.. extract audio, demux CD tracks, all that stuff.

Quicktime 7 is required, and although that too is free, the mpeg plugin is needed and is, as I recall, $20 from Apple. However, well worth it.

Well, here's an update on the situation for you all. I'm in the process of migrating over to the new edit box which has Creative Suite Production Premium CD5.5 running on a six-core i7 CPU and 24GB of RAM and I can now report that .....

1. The Firefox web browser is working very well now (boom! boom!) :-P

2. In the PremierePro CD5.5 I can now successfully place the .ts files directly on to the timeline. It "just works". No need for fudging around any more.

Andrew