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What can play audio-only TS streams?

Added by Adrian Rass over 11 years ago

I'm looking for a command-line client that can play audio-only TS streams provided by tvheadend. (DVB-T here in New Zealand broadcasts radio stations as well as TV.) I believe DVB-T here is MPEG4, not MPEG2 - but perhaps that's only relevant to video?

VLC fails - it's reading the stream (I can tell from the network usage) but outputs nothing. It can happily play the TV channels, including audio. Interestingly, if I tell it to play only the audio of a TV stream (--no-video, from memory) I also just get silence.

Any ideas? I'm not at all attached to VLC and would happily use something else. Command-line only preferably - I really want to be able to control it via ssh.

This is tvheadend 3.4.27 on debian jessie, with an EyeTV USB stick.

Thanks.


Replies (2)

RE: What can play audio-only TS streams? - Added by Prof Yaffle over 11 years ago

Your TS container will contain a video stream (MPEG4/H.264 or MPEG2) and an audio stream (AC3 or AAC) muxed together. Why VLC can't cope with a mux of only one part, I don't know, but my guess is that it's having a bad hair day because of the lack of video.

Are you streaming live, or recording? The latter allows you to re-encode or re-wrap into a different container; the former doesn't so much, since on-the-fly transcoding is inevitably a challenge. You could also try throwing mkv into the mix as a container, since I always found it to be more fault-tolerant than TS since the muxing fixes a multitude of sins - but can introduce others, especially if the audio stream changes at all (e.g. stereo to surround).

You could try mplayer or ffplay since this sounds like a VLC issue.

RE: What can play audio-only TS streams? - Added by Adrian Rass over 11 years ago

Success!

ffplay can play the stream; mplayer couldn't. (For anyone building ffmpeg to get ffplay, you need to specify --with-ffplay.)

Alternatively, when I changed the container to Matroska, vlc could play the stream too. But I prefer ffplay anyway, so I changed it back again.

Thanks for your help.

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