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TSDuck

TSDuck is an extensible toolkit for MPEG/DVB transport streams. TSDuck is used in digital television systems for test, monitoring, integration, debug, lab, demo.

In practice, TSDuck is used for:

  • Transport stream acquisition or transmodulation, including DVB, ATSC, ISDB, ASI and IP multicast.
  • Analyze transport streams, PSI/SI signalization, bitrates, timestamps.
  • Monitor and report conditions on the stream (video and audio properties, bitrates, crypto-periods, signalization).
  • On-the-fly transformation or injection of content and signalization.
  • Modify, remove, rename, extract services.
  • Work on live transport streams, DVB-S/C/T, ATSC, ASI, IP-TV, HTTP, HLS, SRT or offline transport stream files.
  • Re-route transport streams to other applications.
  • Receive from or send to specialized hardware such as cheap tuners, Dektec or HiDes devices and modulators.
  • Extract or inject MPE, SCTE 35, extract Teletext, T2-MI.
  • And more...

For detailed information, guidelines and use cases, please visit TSDuck website.

TSDuck Installation on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

This is a little how-to on building TSduck for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with SRT support.

Build from Source

Building instructions

See building instructions at: https://tsduck.io/doxy/building.html

mkdir tsduck
cd tsduck
git clone https://github.com/tsduck/tsduck.git

Execute the shell-script:

build/install-prerequisites.sh

It downloads and installs the requested packages which are necessary to build TSDuck. The list of packages and how to install them depend on the operating system distribution and version.

Building without specialized dependencies

In specific configurations, you may want to disable some external libraries such as libcurl or pcsc-lite. Of course, the corresponding features in TSDuck will be disabled but the impact is limited. For instance, disabling libcurl will disable the plugin http (the plugin will still be there but it will report an error when used).

The following make variables can be defined:

  • NOTEST : Do not build unitary tests.
  • NODTAPI : No Dektec support, remove dependency to DTAPI.
  • NOCURL : No HTTP support, remove dependency to libcurl.
  • NOPCSC : No smartcard support, remove dependency to pcsc-lite.
  • NOSRT : No SRT (Secure Reliable Transport), remove dependency to libsrt.
  • NOTELETEXT : No Teletext support, remove teletext handling code.
make NOPCSC=1 NOCURL=1 NODTAPI=1

To speed up the compilation time a optional number of parallel threads can be set with the option -j10 make would use 10 parallel processes:

make -j10 NOPCSC=1 NOCURL=1 NODTAPI=1

Set PATH to run from directory

On all Unix systems, the binaries, plugins and tests are built inside the bin subdirectory.

To run a tool from its build directory, a few environment variables shall be defined (including $PATH). A shell-script named setenv.sh in the build directory defines the appropriate environment for running binaries.

Execute:

source build/setenv.sh

Note the usage of the source command to make sure that the environment variables are defined in the current shell.

Example: 

$ source build/setenv.sh 
$ which tsp
~/tsduck/bin/release-x86_64-vmubuntu/tsp
$ tsp --version
tsp: TSDuck - The MPEG Transport Stream Toolkit - version 3.26-2313

Optionally install TSDuck on system

sudo make install

Cleaning up

On Linux and macOS, the same cleanup task is achieved using the following command: 

make distclean

How to replay a .ts file as a stream

1. Use tsanalyze to find out a bitrate of the stream

tsanalyze /home/n00b/Videos/StressTest_4KP25_h264.ts 

===============================================================================
|  TRANSPORT STREAM ANALYSIS REPORT                                           |
|=============================================================================|
|  Transport Stream Id: .......... 1 (0x0001)  |  Services: .............. 1  |
|  Bytes: ....................... 349,332,952  |  PID's: Total: .......... 4  |
|  TS packets: .................... 1,858,154  |         Clear: .......... 4  |
|     With invalid sync: .................. 0  |         Scrambled: ...... 0  |
|     With transport error: ............... 0  |         With PCR's: ..... 1  |
|     Suspect and ignored: ................ 0  |         Unreferenced: ... 0  |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  Transport stream bitrate, based on ....... 188 bytes/pkt    204 bytes/pkt  |
|  User-specified: ................................... None             None  |
|  Estimated based on PCR's: ............... 55,933,494 b/s   60,693,792 b/s  |
                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                             ||||||||||||||
                                             bitrate of the stream

2. Replay .ts file as MPEG-TS UDP stream

tsp -I file --infinite /home/n00b/Videos/StressTest_4KP25_h264.ts -P regulate --bitrate 55933496 -O ip 192.168.2.49:4904

The specification of bitrate of the stream can also be set automatically without use of the --bitrate option:

tsp -I file --infinite /home/n00b/Videos/StressTest_4KP25_h264.ts -P regulate -O ip 192.168.2.49:4904

3. SRT as input or output

Up to TSDuck version 3.25, the srt input plugin used the caller mode and the srt output plugin used the listener mode.

From TSDuck version 3.26 onwards, the srt input and output plugins can indifferently use caller, listener or rendezvous modes, using the same consistent set of command line options. See the TSDuck user's guide for a complete reference.

The following examples are based on version 3.26.

4. Replay .ts file as SRT-Listener stream

Now it's time to get started. There are some differences with the TSDuck SRT implementation compared to other SRT applications. Typically you only specify a port without IP like srt://:4900 and a SRT-listener on port 4900 will be created. If you specify an IP:port combination, SRT typically would act as SRT-caller to that IP:port (e.g. srt://192.168.2.49:4900)

With TSDuck, you can create a listener port and optionally specify the adapter, which it should listen on using --listener port or --listener interface:port. In this test the Linux machine has two interfaces and the one with IP 192.168.2.3 was chosen to act as listening interface.

tsp -I file --infinite /home/n00b/Videos/StressTest_4KP25_h264.ts -P regulate -O srt --listener 192.168.2.3:4900 --transtype live --messageapi

It is also possible to just specify the port without a particular interface to use:

tsp -I file --infinite /home/n00b/Videos/StressTest_4KP25_h264.ts -P regulate -O srt --listener 4900 --transtype live --messageapi

A detail worth mentioning: -O srt --listener "[IP:]Port" for tsp already specifies the usage of the SRT protocol. So there is no need to add the srt:// prefix to the IP or DNS-name. Adding it would actually result in an error.

Now another SRT application can connect to that SRT stream on 192.168.2.3:4900 provided by tsp, e.g., srt-live-transmit sample application to flip it back to MPEG-TS.

srt-live-transmit.exe srt://192.168.2.3:4900 udp://192.168.2.49:10002

Or VLC player: press CTRL+N to open a new network stream and type in URL srt://192.168.2.3:4900 to connect to the stream in this example.

Analyzing incoming SRT stream

Incoming SRT stream containing MPEG-TS one can also be analyzed. The following example would connect in caller mode to the SRT stream, which was sent out using tsp as described in the section above and perform an analysis for 10 seconds:

tsp -I srt --caller 192.168.2.3:4900 --transtype live --messageapi -P until --seconds 10 -P analyze -O drop

It would generate an output to stdout like this (shortened)

===============================================================================
|  TRANSPORT STREAM ANALYSIS REPORT                                           |
|=============================================================================|
|  Transport Stream Id: .......... 1 (0x0001)  |  Services: .............. 1  |
|  Bytes: ........................ 99,391,840  |  PID's: Total: .......... 4  |
|  TS packets: ...................... 528,680  |         Clear: .......... 4  |
|     With invalid sync: .................. 0  |         Scrambled: ...... 0  |
|     With transport error: ............... 0  |         With PCR's: ..... 1  |
|     Suspect and ignored: ................ 0  |         Unreferenced: ... 0  |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  Transport stream bitrate, based on ....... 188 bytes/pkt    204 bytes/pkt  |
|  User-specified: ......................... 69,642,777 b/s   75,569,821 b/s  |
|  Estimated based on PCR's: ............... 58,771,501 b/s   63,773,331 b/s  |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  Broadcast time: .................................... 11 sec (0 mn 11 sec)  |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  Srv Id  Service Name                              Access          Bitrate  |
|  0x0001  Service01 .................................... C   67,660,510 b/s  |
|                                                                             |
|  Note 1: C=Clear, S=Scrambled                                               |
|  Note 2: Unless specified otherwise, bitrates are based on 188 bytes/pkt    |
===============================================================================
...

Output was cut off here. For more details perform this on your stream or see the TSDuck user's guide.