Need help with saving video

[fotty]

OK, I have spent several days trying to extract video from my cable company provided DVR. Several channels are not marked as copy protected, which means I can pull them via firewire to my laptop.

That is now all working fine after several hours of trying to figure it out. VLC player does a GREAT job of capturing the stream.

However now I am stuck on a new problem. The way I do this is "Open Capture Device" in VLC, then I also select the option to save the stream. I left it on MPEG TS and ripped the video/audio, and it created the mpg file, and it plays back great in VLC.

However it does not play in any other media player. (I tried winamp and WMP which should have no problem playing MPEG 2 content).

Now I am a pretty technical person, I write software for a living. I understand for the most part how containers, codecs, and all that work, but I am not an expert on the subject.

So basically what I want to know is, what settings are optimal for ripping this content to a format that can be played anywhere, or at least in a basic MPEG format that is recognized by all.

Once I have that, I can use other software to convert to xvid or divx or whatever, I just need to know how I can save this so it will play in something other than just VLC.

Since I have the TS MPEG rip of my test on my PC, I know I can open it again and save the stream to another file. I have done this and tried a few different transcoding and encapsulation method options, however I have yet to get anything to play anywhere but VLC.

Thanks for any help.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

try asf wmv in order to get WMP to understand it.

[fotty]

try asf wmv in order to get WMP to understand it.

j-b:

I have been trying several different combinations of encoding/transcoding/etc. I did make some progress when I tried asf, but let me actually restate my intentions:

My goal is not to get it to work in WMP. My goal is to get it recognizable as a standard mpeg 2 video file. Perhaps I don't know what a "standard mpeg2 video file is", as I know mpeg2 is a container, and the actual codec could vary.

Basically my goal is 2 fold:

1) burn some of the content to DVD, with as little as transcoding as possible. I would imagine since the stream I rip is MPEG2 TS, then I should be able to convert this in a lossless manner to DVD right?

2) convert other content to AVI which will be encoded to DIVX or XVID, for streaming playback to my xbox 360 via my Windows Media server. All that would be needed to accomplish this, would be a way to convert the media to a raw AVI file format, which I can then encode with DIVX software which I own.

So if you could shed some light on either of these 2 things that would be great.

Also when I finally got the ripping to work from my cablebox, I just picked MPEG TS because it was the default. Should I try MPEG PS or something? My thought was it didn't matter, because once I had the stream in the MPEG TS format, I could then just convert it in VLC to the other container types without transcoding, if I found out one container would suit my needs better than another.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Sorry, but if I remember correctly, WMP doesn't understand TS.

[fotty]

Sorry, but if I remember correctly, WMP doesn't understand TS.

That may be so.

Could you provide me any details on what settings in VLC to prep an mpeg TS file for output to a DVD?