Introduction

Boxes like the freebox provided by the french ISP "free" allow recording of TV channels. Such records are encoded using an internal vlc service in Transport Stream format. Usually for a common 2h movie the size of the records can reach 3 to 4Gb -- and if you intend to record at least 2 movies each week then you will reach your hard disk capacity sooner than expected!

ts2avi is a python script that will allow conversion of all your ts videos into a common divx container (with MPEG4 for video format and MP3 for audio format). The sizes of the produced video files are 4 to 6 times lesser than the original ones -- with however a minimum degradation of image quality.

Prerequisites

ts2avi being a python script, of course you will need a recent installation of python. It is recommended to have a 2.7 version although the script might work with a 2.6 version, as it uses the subprocess module.

For video conversion the script relies on mencoder, please check that it is installed or download it from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html. For most GNU/Linux distributions it should be available alongside with mplayer.

ts2avi is at present working only for linux-based platforms. However it can be easily tuned for MS Windows ones, if the prerequisites are installed, but it should need a small tuning of the script to overwrite the default path for mencoder.

Installation

The ts2avi script is shipped as a distutils package. To install the library, unpack the distribution archive, and issue the following command:

$ python setup.py install

If you want to have a local installation of the script, or equivalently if you don't have root access for installing site-packages, you may want to make benefit from the new 'user' option which is provided by recent versions of distutils:

$ python setup.py install --user

This will install everything in your $HOME/.local directory for POSIX users. Don't forget to add your $HOME/.local/bin to your path for instance in you .bashrc source bash configuration file.

You might also install ts2avi as an egg package using the setuptools easy_install script:

$ easy_install ts2avi

would do everything for you: download and install ts2avi.

Usage

Basic usage is as follows:

$ ts2avi.py <myrecord>.ts

This would convert the argument TS file into an MPEG4 <myrecord>.avi file in the same current directory. Please notice that the script recognizes all current Unix pattern expansion, so for instance if you would like to convert all records from a given TV channel:

$ ts2avi.py TMC*.ts

For storage of output files in a different directory, which could be usefull if you intend to copy the avi files on an external hard disk for instance, use the --output_dir option:

$ ts2avi.py --output_dir=/media/hdd/Videos *.ts

Video conversion is done using different profiles (see How it works). To select a given profile issue the following command:

$ ts2avi.py --profile='fast' <myrecord>.ts

For full explanation on the different options of ts2avi, try:

$ ts2avi.py --help

How it works

For each argument file, the video conversion is performed in a temporary directory. The different steps are the followings:

1. The container is transformed into MPEG (audio and video encoding are however totally preserved during this operation, it is a pure copy)
2. Audio is extracted and converted separatly into MP3
3. Finally a video encoding into MPG4 is performed using a two pass process.

Different profiles are available however. To select one of them, use the --profile option. The previous steps refer to the default profile which is supposed to provide the best quality possible.

Drawbacks (v. 0.1.1)

• For the moment, the script is working on Unix-like platforms. Tuning it for MS Windows is however not very complicated: just use the '--mencoder_path' option to set the precise path to your local installation of mencoder.
• Multiprocessing is not working at present. This could be usefull since video conversion can last several hours especially when converting more than one video files. This will be probably developped in a further version by using the multiprocessing python module.
• The original files are not deleted after conversion, and won't be either in a further version. This is done on purpose, just in case the quality of the converted video is not good enough, and you would like to try another profile.
• Of course, ts2avi will not remove advertising. For that purpose, use some video editor like Avidemux. Performing this operation before the video conversion is even better since you will gain the time due to advertising conversion.

TODO (v. 0.1.1)

• allow the user to define its own profiles in a "ts2avi.ini" file
• adjust error treatment
• instead of using the python print command, make use of the logging module
• allow multiple conversions at the same time using the multiprocessing python module