OT: MPEG2 w/PCM audio possible

larry-peter wrote on 1/15/2015, 11:14 AM
There are a few broadcasters who still require MPEG2 video with PCM audio in an .mpg program stream. I've seen this issue being discussed on Creative Cow and many encoder forums - and I believe this was brought up in this forum a few years back. There appears to be a way to do this directly on a Mac using MPEG2 in a mov container, but no real workflow in Windows.

This will work: If you have an encoder that will deliver Grass Valley Server files (.GXF extension) such as Telestream Episode, you can encode an MPEG2 stream with PCM audio, and then change the file extension to .mpg.

Although I couldn't find a Windows player that could play the audio in the files (I assume windows MPEG2 codecs don't support PCM even on playback) the station approved the file, MediaInfo reports all the video and audio streams correctly, and if I import the .mpg back into the encoder and transcode to another format the audio plays back perfectly in QT or WIndows media player.

Wanted to share in case anyone else has run into this issue.

Comments

Laurence wrote on 1/16/2015, 8:34 PM
XDcam mp4 and mxf formats hav an mpeg2 video stream with uncompressed audio.
musicvid10 wrote on 1/17/2015, 9:38 AM
Two things to try:

/MUX the audio in Avidemux
/Make a DVD and rename .vob to .mpg
Easy to join multiple vob files into one.
larry-peter wrote on 1/17/2015, 11:37 AM
The muxing in an external app would probably work, although I haven't gone that route. Renaming a VOB is an interesting approach too.

And I didn't get into the specs demanded by the broadcaster - it was MPEG2 MPML program stream @ 15 Mbs 720 X 480 SD. There are several HD rendering solutions to this, but this was the first fairly simple (and acceptable to the broadcaster) SD rendering solution I found.