Playing Transport Stream captures from DVB-T on OSX

Forums › Freeview (DVB-T/DVB-S) › Playing Transport Stream captures from DVB-T on OSX

mikerussellnz

283 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 2

#45420 2-Nov-2009 17:24

Hi

Does anyone know how to play TS files from DVB-T on OSX. I have tried Quicktime X and it doesn't want to play them. I was hoping to use the HW acceleration in Quicktime X.

Any ideas?

stroke64

60 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 7

#269354 2-Nov-2009 18:31

I assume you are playing with files recorded off Freeview NZ?

AFAIK there is no way to play them natively under Quicktime. You could use Handbrake to transcode them but that takes ages.

VLC will handle them but doesn't do hardware acceleration so you need a decent CPU.

You could look at EyeTV, although I haven't used it personally so I don't know if it plays byo files.

nigelramsay

80 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 18

#269627 3-Nov-2009 14:37

You could try MPlayer OSX Extended, which is supposed to be more efficient than VLC

http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/

--

Nigel Ramsay
Wellington, NZ

Twitter: @nigelramsay

Read my blog at https://nigel.ramsay.org.nz
I work on AddressFinder at Abletech

stroke64

60 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 7

#269676 3-Nov-2009 16:38

nigelramsay: You could try MPlayer OSX Extended, which is supposed to be more efficient than VLC/

Looks interesting. I'll have a look at this one when I get home from work and report back on my experience.

stroke64

60 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 7

#269746 3-Nov-2009 20:26

stroke64:
nigelramsay: You could try MPlayer OSX Extended, which is supposed to be more efficient than VLC/

Looks interesting. I'll have a look at this one when I get home from work and report back on my experience.

Ok I've had a play with the latest versions of both VLC and MPlayer OSX Extended.

MPOSXE (Rev 12) wasn't as good as VLC in the tests. It doesn't know how to play the interlaced Freeview HD channels at the correct frame-rate, so video lags audio by about 2:1. I had a play with all the available preferences and it made no difference to this. That only leaves the non-interlaced channels (TV1 & TV2), the recordings from both of which used at least 100% of a CPU core on my 2.4Ghz 13" unibody Macbook. I had to have the multithreading option enabled to get playback stable. On the positive side, it did know about the audio codecs, which is a common problem I run into with playing Freeview content.

VLC (Ver 1.0.2) on the other hand plays recordings from all the channels at the correct framerate, and used 10-20% less CPU for the same media- mostly sitting around 90% CPU.

I also noted that MPlayer uses around 10% more bandwidth than VLC when playing files over a LAN. I don't understand why it is happening, but it meant that MPlayer struggled to play any HD content over WiFi, whereas VLC seemed to manage (just).