what is up here?

Question

what is up here?

Hi All
I want some Program Stream files, so I drop my nice PAL movie into Compressor, select MPEG2 and MPEG1 layer2 audio to make a muxed Transport Stream. Make the .mts file and look at it in Finder, it's a blank icon!??! ***!. The only app. I have that will open it is MPEG Streamclip. Fine, open in Streamclip, select export to Program Stream. Now I have my .mpeg file. But now when I look at it in Finder it is 720x540, but in Streamclip it says 720x576. Who is right, and where did the pixels go? Plus, how can Compressor make a file format, .mts , that is not even recognised by Compressor or Finder or QT?
Baaahhhh! I find MPEG2 the most frustrating format on earth.

PM G5 & PB, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Apr 22, 2006 8:54 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 23, 2006 5:24 AM in response to Robert Dunford

It is a good question why Apple's tools can't play transport stream, but that's how it seems to be. Even more so, because Quicktime tracks would provide nice mapping to transport stream PIDs.

The resolution reported by Streamclip is correct. Finder and Quicktime unfortunately scale the resolution to square pixel aspect, squashing in the vertical direction, causing interlaced clips to look horrible. IMO this is stupid and unneccessary - DV clips are not scaled. I was puzzled by this a while ago and also made a little test to see if there's some extraneous scaling somewhere in the encoding steps: fortunately not, it's just quicktime/finder that scale the clip at the viewing stage (that is to say, decoding stage goes also correctly).

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Answer 2

Apr 23, 2006 8:55 AM in response to Heikki Lindholm

Great answer, thanks. My problem is that I am running a closed TV network, streamed off a device called a Soloist by Adtec. It seems very fussy about the MPEG files. I have been creating a lot of graphics and Motion stuff, put it through Compressor to get my TS, then through Streamclip to make it a PS. The Adtec gets these files but then throws a wobbly on some of them. For instance, I had a nice Motion sequence for the TV schedule, with some nice tinkly musak in the bkgd. on my mac it sounds great, pop the file on the Soloist and it sounds rubbish.
I wish I could find someone who runs Macs and runs these Adtec boxes and gets it all to work fine and hunky-dory!!! Maybe I should be looking at a standalone compression software. The awful thing is, that on a Windows box I have also, everything works brilliantly. MUST I go over to the darkside, just to do my graphics.
Mind you, if Adobe bring out something akin to FCP Studio, which I hear they may, I might have to pull a BootCamp. I do like AE6.5, very powerful stuff.

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Answer 3

Apr 23, 2006 1:09 PM in response to Robert Dunford

Indeed the power of the dark side is undeniable and, alas, I can't help you with the Adtec thingy, but usually when things seem fine on a computer, but go south on some h/w decoder, buffering is the key difference. In this case, it would point to Streamclip muxer's direction - maybe it doesn't adhere to correct buffering models. I don't know of any other easy-to-use muxer for OS X, though (there's mplex from mjpegtools, but that's command-line.) I doubt Compressor's m2v/mp2 output itself is that bad...

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