alfons

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Posts posted by alfons


  1. @jelockwood:

    On 2.5.2017 at 3:38 PM, jelockwood said:

    @alfonsSadly ProjectX appears to not have been updated for many years. What version of OS X are you running it under? It would be interesting to know whether it still works under recent versions of OS X.

    To everyone in general, has anyone tried using MPEG StreamClip to open directly the EyeTV video file inside the EyeTV recording package and then using MPEG StreamClip to re-save it? MPEG StreamClip is very good at handling both program streams and transport streams.

    To everyone in general. I find VLC's conversion wizard totally useless for MPEG4 files. It never lets you select a mp4 container format only AVI at best and even then the results are also useless, especially if you try using pass-thru. I find AviDemux best for this sort of thing.

    To everyone in general. I have found some Internet sourced MPEG4 videos on occasion have had audio tracks which have been MP3 which QuickTime does not like - QuickTime will only accept AAC, but I have also seen a few supposedly AAC ones also cause problems. Like suggested by @SiChan I have used AviDemux to 'fix' these by re-encoding the audio track.

    To everyone in general. Neither DVB-T standard definition MPEG2 aka FreeView or DVB-T2 high definition H.264 aka FreeView HD as used in the UK have DRM. (At least if you exclude the mainly adult channels that require a subscription.)

    On my Mac, ProjectX currently runs under Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11). I still use it once in a while and it still works very well.

    However, my usual workflow has changed because I now use TS-Doctor. It is actually a Windows program but runs well on Macs using a Wine-based Windows emulator. There is an installation script for PlayOnMac which worked very well (you'll find a link at https://cypheros.de/forum_ger2/index.php?topic=3746.0 -- the description on this site is in German but the screenshots may help). Although TS-Doctor is paid software (and it spontaneously crashes once in while), I find it very well worth the money because it greatly simplifies my workflow regarding subtitles and saves a lot of time when dealing with recordings from channels with advertisements. The program produces .ts files which don't play 100% correct. I further process these files by just opening and saving them in Avidemux (for BBC and Channel 4 recordings, using pass-thru settings) or by converting their audio stream using ffmpeg (for ITV and Channel 5 recordings, which for whatever reason use a somewhat different audio).

    As to your questions regarding MPEG streamclip or VLC conversion: I also found both not working directly with EyeTV's .mpg files. For channels from different satellites I sometimes ffmpeg with pass-thru (or remux, which is a GUI for ffmpeg).


  2. Thanks to you both for sharing your experiences with these recordings.

    @SiChanRegarding your remark on the audio track length of 00:00:00 in Subler: I had the same issue and I suspect that this is due to missing meta-information in the audio stream. If one ignores those zeros and saves the file in Subler, it shows the correct duration. (At least it does so for me.)

    @BillyBob: I also experienced the issue of the first few seconds of audio missing and worked around this by keeping a few more seconds at the beginning of the recording. Not ideal, but it works.


  3. Hi,

    I can confirm that these Freeview HD recordings are tricky. I don't believe the problem is with DRM, but rather with some quirky makeup of these streams (which may very well have to do with headers). From my experience, using the Export function in EyeTV doesn't work for these streams. I experienced the same choppy video and/or stuttering audio.

    I found different ways to deal with these streams:

    1. Separate the audio and video streams and process them using different apps, then re-mux them. The audio stream can be extracted with EyeTV (using the "export mpeg elementary streams" option). The video stream can be extracted from the mpg file (in the .eyetv package) using Avidemux (video codec "copy", saved in an mp4 container). Both streams can the be muxed in an app like Subler. This process does not require re-encoding.
    2. Use ffmpeg on the mpg file (in the .eyetv package) to convert the audio, like so: 
      /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$FileName" -vcodec copy -af "aresample=matrix_encoding=dplii" -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -metadata:s:a:1 lang=eng -acodec aac -y /tmp/muxed.mp4

      You may want to adjust the audio processing settings (-af "aresample=matrix_encoding=dplii" -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -metadata:s:a:1 lang=eng -acodec aac) to your liking. Also, you must of course edit the location/name of the source (-i) and target (-y) files. You can easily install ffmpeg using Homebrew.

    3. One could probably also use VLC to re-package the .mpg file (using either the "convert/stream" or the "stream/export assistant" menu items) without re-encoding the streams. (I remember having tried that but I don't recall the reason for not having used this option.)

    I wrote a little Automator script for option 2 to automate the process (save this as a "service" which receives movie files in Finder; one can then use this directly on .eyetv packages). Please note that this script also takes care of extracting and converting the subtitles (which are usually off by 2 to 4 seconds; they need to be synced afterwards). This functionality requires additional apps. These lines of code can just be deleted if not desired.

    for f in "$@"
    do
    	###### general stuff
    	ShowName=`/usr/bin/basename "$f" .eyetv`
    	cd "$f"
    	FileName="$(ls *.mpg)"
    
    	###### convert stream
    	/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$FileName" -vcodec copy -af "aresample=matrix_encoding=dplii" -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -metadata:s:a:1 lang=eng -acodec aac -y /tmp/muxed.mp4
    
    	###### extract and convert subtitles
    	java -jar /Applications/ProjectX/ProjectX.app/Contents/Resources/Java/ProjectX.jar "$f"/*mpg -ini /Applications/ProjectX/X.ini -name tempfile -out /tmp
    	/usr/local/bin/VobSub2SRT --tesseract-data /usr/local/share/tessdata /tmp/tempfile.sup
    	/Applications/SubCleaner.app/Contents/MacOS/SubCleaner /tmp/tempfile.sup.srt &
    	sleep 3
    	killall SubCleaner
    	mv /tmp/tempfile.sup.srt ~/Movies/"$ShowName".en.srt
    
    	###### clean up
    	mv /tmp/muxed.mp4 ~/Movies/"$ShowName".m4v
    	rm /tmp/tempfile*
    	rm -r /tmp/Original\ Subtitles
    
    done

    I hope this is helpful to you (or anyone). It'd be great if you could let me/us know how this works for you (or which other solutions you find).