.TS

Introduction

The MPEG transport stream is the container used for digital television. It is defined in MPEG-2 Systems (ISO/IEC 13818-1, also ITU-T H.222.0) and was designed for links that can lose or corrupt data, such as broadcast. DVB, ATSC and IPTV broadcasts use it, recordings from TV tuners are saved as .ts files, and HTTP Live Streaming has long delivered its segments as .ts files.

Blu-ray discs and AVCHD camcorders use a variant with the extensions .m2ts and .mts, in which each packet is preceded by a 4-byte timestamp. The .ts extension is also used for TypeScript source code.

Structure

A transport stream is a sequence of fixed-size packets of 188 bytes. Each packet starts with the sync byte 47, followed by flags and a 13-bit packet identifier (PID) that says which stream the packet belongs to, a continuity counter and an optional adaptation field that can carry the programme clock. The rest of the packet is payload.

The audio and video are cut into PES packets (packetised elementary streams) and spread across transport packets with the same PID. Tables tell a receiver what is in the stream: the Program Association Table on PID 0 lists the programmes, and each programme’s Program Map Table lists the PIDs of its video, audio and subtitle streams.

Also used for

• TypeScript source code .ts
• TypeScript source code .mts

Links