C y p h e r o s D V B - To o l s

TS-Doctor
MANUAL

(Most of the translation by: Khan)

 Table of contents

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 5
1.1 Procedural method of the application ..................................................... 5
System Tables (PAT/PMT) ...................................................................... 5
Clearing up streams ............................................................................. 6
Correction of color space ........................................................................ 6
1.2 Supported Formats .......................................................................... 7
Chapter 2: The Main Window 9
Chapter 3: Cutting procedure 11
3.1 Filter/Codecs ............................................................................... 11
3.2 Cutting/Preview Window ................................................................. 13
Chapter 4: Deletion of streams 15
Chapter 5: Preserve 17
Chapter 6: Patch 19
Chapter 7: Links 21
 1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays users can choose amongst an increasing number of recording hardware that allows
to record Satellite or Cable Programs. Unfortunately recordings of Hard Disk Receivers or
PCs are often faulty or they are being saved in a proprietary format and therefore won´t play
on all devices. Especially Hardware Players like Popcorn Hour, WD-TV-HD or Playstation 3
enjoy growing popularity amongst users who like to play their recordings at home. But the
devices currently on the market react very sensitive on file formats or errors in a stream and
refuse Playback, freeze or spoil the playback performance with sound / video dropouts and
other kinds of disturbance.
Cypheros TS-Doctor was designed to scan DVB Transport Streams for errors and correct them
in a way that the resulting file(s) will play back without surges, dropouts or diverging sound
and picture on Hardware- or Software-Media players.
Unlike some other tools, TS-Doctor tries to keep the original stream as untouched as possible
during error correction, thus avoiding the creation of additional incompatibilities.

1.1 Procedural method of the application

When a file is being opened, TS-Doctor first starts analyzing if its properties match those of a
transport stream or not. Is it a regular transport stream with 188 Bytes Package size or is it a
M2TS transport stream with 192 Byte Packages?
Afterwards the existing elements of the stream are being searched through and analyzed.

System Tables (PAT/PMT)

The system tables PAT and PMT are a kind of directory for the stream and contain important
information about the PIDs allocation to the audio-, video- and data- streams (EPG, Subtitles,
etc.) and the used codec like MPEG1,MPEG2,AVC,AC3,DTS and so on.

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 1 INTRODUCTION

System tables of DVB recordings are often faulty or missing. TS-Doctor corrects these
tables and cares that only those streams are being listed in the directory, which really exist.
Should TS-Doctor find no system tables at all, it will create these tables itself.

Clearing up streams
When you click on the START button TS-Doctor will begin cleaning the stream, creating a
new copy extracted from your original file. While copying all the stream´s components are
permanently being investigated and found CRCs are being checked. Unnecessary elements of
the stream or too heavily corrupted parts will be deleted.

Correction of color space

In their menu under “HDMI Settings” most up-to-date devices offer you the possibility to
adjust the color space being used for playback. Manufacturers use different names like Color-
space, RGB-Level, RGB-Range, Color-Range or RGB output area.

You can choose between two possible settings: “PC color space” and “DVD/DVB color
space”. The PC color space (Enhanced, Full or L2 color space) utilizes brightness values from
0 – 255. The DVD/DVB color space (Limited or L1 color space) utilizes brightness values
from 16 – 235.

Because video data from your playing device (DVD-, DVB-, Bluray or Mediaplayer) is being
sent pixel by pixel to your output device (TV, beamer, monitor) via HDMI/DVI, the output
device must exactly know how to display the brightness values of all pixels.

If for example a DVD player sends the brightness value” 16” for a pixel to a LCD-TV being
set to DVD/DVB color space, the pixel would be displayed as the deepest Black possible for
the TV set. If the TV set were adjusted to PC color space instead, the same pixel would only
be displayed in a dark Grey, because there are sixteen more possible brightness values down
(15 – 0) to the deepest Black. The same difficulties exist with the presentation of White,
because the brightness value “235” could either be the brightest White or only a slight Grey.
So it´s important to set playing- and output- devices to the same color space in order to get
the correct brightness values being displayed.

Some negative effects are being produced by misleadingly flagged HDTV DVB streams, e.g.
broadcasts from German Premiere TV channel “Discovery-HD”. In this case the flag
“video_full_range_flags” (which means PC color space) is wrongly being set active. But DVB
streams usually should be broadcasted within the DVD/DVB color space as being regulated
by DVB standard. DVB receivers ignore the flag and by default operate within DVD/DVB
color space. However, if you playback such a DVB stream on a multimedia player like “Pop-
corn Hour”, the same problems arise with these streams that you usually get with wrong
HDMI color space adjustment.

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Procedural method of the application

Illustration 1.1: Effect of a wrongly set “video_full_range_flag”

1.2 Supported Formats

TS-Doctor supports DVB transport streams (Standard and HDTV resolution) of the following
kind

.TS (DVB-Viewer, ProgDVB, Dreambox, Dbox2, Technisat, etc.)

.TRP (Kathrein UFS-910, etc.)
.TS4 (Technisat HD, etc.)
.M2TS (Humax iCord, etc.)
.DVR (Comag SL 100 HD)

and converts them into DVB compliant 188 Byte transport streams (.TS format).

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 2 The Main Window

Illustration 2.1: The main window

The main window gives you access to all functions of TS-Doctor and provides you with a
detailed overview on the features of the opened stream.

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 2 The Main Window

When you open a stream, several steps of preparation are being executed. On the right side
of the main window you will see their ongoing progress. Each Step should be displayed in
green color, signalizing that the particular step has been carried out successfully.

On the left side of the main window the audio and video streams are being listed, which
TS-Doctor found in the opened file and its associated system tables.

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 3 Cutting procedure

TS-Doctor supports cutting of streams at their beginning and their end. If the necessary Dir-
ectShow codecs are installed on your system (PC) you will be able to cut your recordings pre-
cisely within TS-Doctor´s video preview window by visually setting trim marks.
Should you ever come across a DirectX error message when opening the preview window,
probably a necessary video codec is missing.

3.1 Filter/Codecs

Note, that for video preview TS-Doctor by default lets the graphbuilder (DirectX) choose the
appropriate filter / respectively video codec for the particular stream. This means that with an
AVC/H264 video stream with AC3 sound another filter is being used than with a MPEG2
video stream with MPEG1 sound.

A recommendable codec for AVC/H264 HDTV streams is CoreAVC from CORECODEC

because it´s one of the fastest HDTV codecs around and on top is being sold at an appropriate
and fair prize of 15,- USD.

For all other stream types like MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AC3, DTS, E-AC3, TrueHD, etc.
the Open Source - Codec collection ffdshow tryouts is very advisable.

In case your system should have problems with the automatic choice of filters and the video
preview doesn't want to appear, you can as well determine a manual combination of filters in
“Settings/Preferences/Preview”.

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 3 Cutting procedure

Illustration 3.1: Manual choice of filters for video preview

Of course filters you want to use first have to be installed on your system. For license reasons
they are not included in TS-Doctor although part of them are freeware and can easily be
downloaded from the internet.

The MPEG Splitter on your system is of special importance, because it´s responsible for open-
ing the playback files and splitting them into the correct audio- and video- streams. Each
splitter has special favorite file formats that it can handle well and others it plays back faulty
or not at all.

The Gabest (freeware) splitter is a good choice for .TRP recordings (Kathrein UFS 910,
Abcom IpBox, etc.) whereas the Haali (freeware) splitter provides better results with DVB
compliant .TS files.

In case, problems with certain filters should appear, by clicking on the button “Show DirectX
Log” you can let TS-Doctor show you information about the creation of playback graphs for
the video preview.

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Cutting/Preview Window

3.2 Cutting/Preview Window

Illustration 3.2: Cutting window with visual preview

In the cutting/preview window you can determine cutting points of beginning and end of your
recordings. You can either type in the corresponding values into the input boxes “Begin at”
and “End at” or you can wind your video forwards/backwards to the desired destination and
then click on the buttons near the input boxes.

By pressing the „Filter“ button a list of all used Filters/Codecs will be shown the DirectX-
Graphbuilder is using for playback.

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 4 Deletion of streams

TS-Doctor deletes all streams that are of non audio- or non video- format or which are not
registered in the PMT system tables. But some of your recordings may have various audio
streams in different languages or different formats like AC3 2.0/ AC3 5.1/ MPEG1, etc.

These different audio streams are listed on the left side of the main window. By simply click-
ing on one of the loudspeaker symbols you can mark the audio stream for deletion. (Note:
Right click opens a menu for changing the language descriptor of an audio stream.)

Illustration 4.1: Deletion of an audio stream

Only audio streams can be marked for deletion and at least one audio stream must be left
over!

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 5 Preserve

With this function you can avoid streams like Teletext to be automatically deleted. Usually
TS-Doctor deletes all non audio and non video streams. If you mark one of these streams in
the “Preserve streams” window, it won´t be deleted.

Illustration 5.1: Preserve streams func-

tion

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 6 Patch

Especially for Dreambox users TS-Doctor has a function built in that allows you to patch the
SID (program number) and the PIDs in order to correct the allocation to the EIT and the Meta-
file. Without this correction any files, which were edited with tools like TSMuxer or
H264Cutter, can´t be played back correctly on a Dreambox. TS-Doctor´s “Stream Patch”
function allows you to reconstruct the original SID and PID allocation.

Illustration 6.1: Patching of PID und SID-allocation

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 7 Links

• Cypheros Homepage
• CoreAVC from CORECODEC
• fdshow tryouts
• Gabest MediaSplitter (MpegSplitter.ax)
• Haali Media Splitter

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