Finding mpeg 2 packages in matlab with fread

Question

I used a ts analyzer for a .ts file i have with mpeg-2 codec and i found out that it splits in 7311 packets. I m trying to find this through matlab by using fopen to open the ts file in binary and fread to read the file but all i get is a column with a huge collection of numbers(way above the number of packets). Does anyone know how can i determine which of these data are the packets? Or if someone knows another way to find the packets would help me a lot. Thank you in advance

Answer 1

From some quick googling, the MPEG-2 transport stream ('ts') format consists of packets 188-bytes in length, each having a 4-byte header followed by a 184-byte payload. Essentially, you can count the number of packets by counting the number of headers you find - but beware that, if you are only interested in counting the number of, e.g., video packets in the stream, then you will need some deeper analysis of the headers, because the stream may contain any number of interleaved "elementary streams" (which can be video, audio, or arbitrary data). Each elementary packet type in the stream is denoted by a unique "PID" which is contained in the header.

Aside from the above, you will also have to handle synchronisation - each header begins with the "synchronisation byte", which has a value 0x47 (or 01000111 in binary). According to this resource, decoders begin by looking for this synchronisation byte; once they find one, they may have found a packet header. To make sure, they try to find three consecutive synchronisation bytes (188 bytes apart in the stream); if three are found, synchronisation can occur and the packet boundaries may from then on be assumed at 188-byte intervals. Note, however, that the first byte of each assumed header should be checked to see if it is a synchronisation byte - if it is not, then this is called "sync loss" and the syncrhonisation process must start again.

Once you have some code to syncrhonise to a stream, it should be fairly easy to extract the PIDs from the header of each packet and count the number of packets associated with each unique PID you find. You should probably also check the first bit after the synchronisation byte as, if set to 1, this indicates a transport error, and the packet's payload is invalid. Detailed information on the format of packet headers can be found here.