What do you use to concatenate *mts snippets?

[Cox Orange]

Hi,

my PVR records TV in *mts snippets of each 512MB (several of them in a row are e.g. one movie or series's episode). (They are both SD mpeg2 and HD x264 under the hood)

On my Mac I need to concatenate them.

I used to use Avidemux

put files in Avidemux. Cut. Then:
video output: copy
audio output: copy
output format: mpeg TS muxer (ffmpeg)
or mpeg PS muxer (ffmpeg)

Then I read that it creates non compliant files (?!?!?)

I was recommended mkvtoolnix
https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html

advantages:
- compliant files
- tracks not needed can be eliminated (video-text, subtitles, other language tracks)
- FillerBytes (Nalu, Null-Bytes), can be eliminated, too => saves space but doesn't change quality/bitrate one bit

disadvantage:
- no "Quickview" preview in Finder
- as far as I could test with mkv files from the internet they are not smooth/easy to scroll through in VLC.


What do you use?

Again, I don't want to encode them (change the bitrate / quality). I want to keep the original file just without the trash and not as several parts.


I found this https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/convert-avchd-mts-to-mov.1308610/ but it doesn't first concatenate the snippets and cut off trash at beginning and end as far as I understand and mpegstreamclip is missing a component to read *mts.

 

[ColdCase]

I have a couple PVRs that record in the same format. These are AVCHD type files and most of the free AVCHD converters on the apple store should handle them when the original is decent quality (in the fine print they may mention .mts files). OTA broadcast video can be good quality, but more often than not there are drop outs that most of the free stuff won't handle well.

I now use BigaSoft ProRes converter with a couple parameter tweaks to pull video out of .mts files more reliably. They offer a free trial, see if that works for you. It is overkill for most situations, but when you need the power, it can be a big time saver.

A lot of these are GUI in front of ffmeg. BigaSoft's GUI allows you to tinker with the ecode/transcode values.

 

[Nermal]

It's been a while since I've used it, but I think tsMuxer can losslessly join the files. The result will still be in a TS format.

 

[Cox Orange]

Thank you both!

Anyone else?

 

[phrehdd]

It's been a while since I've used it, but I think tsMuxer can losslessly join the files. The result will still be in a TS format.

tsMuxer works quite well but make sure you use the "join" rather than "add" when setting up your series of files in tsMuxer. I have used it with m2ts files mostly and it works very well.

 

[Cox Orange]

I thought of another possible way, since I was recommended mkvtoolnix, but it doesn't come out in my desired container, I thought of the follwoing:

1. use mkvtoolnix to cut and join m2ts files and save it, result will be .mkv-container (which will not be previewable in OS X's Quickview and doesn't allow scrolling through the movie in VLC)
2. I use this https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-video-containers-without-reencoding.1433969/ to convert the mkv from step 1 to a .mov container, which Quickview and VLC should be happy with under OS X, or better to mpeg4-container to make it even more universal plus Mac-friendly at the same time.

The only thing that bothers me is, that it is the first app the developer wrote for Macs, he says.

I will try it once I have time again.