November 03 2005

There was not much action during this year on mpgtx. Real life takes more time, so there is lesser for funny projects. I try to keep bug tracker up-to-date and hope to have some more time next months. I think over closing bug tracker for logged-in users only although I dislike this, because there are plenty of anonymous bug reports that need some clarification by the submitter. If I couldn't reach them and can't reproduce their bug, the reports are nearly useless. So please leave at least your mail address in the bug tracker.

January 02 2005

End of a two years long sleep. Now there is a "Happy new Year"-Release available with waiting patches and some improvements included. Bug tracker is up-to-date now.

November 24 2004

Exactly Two years later we're back on the track thank to Erik Schanze. This guy tracked me, found me and waked me up. He is willing to help and already applied some long waiting patches to the trunk. A bug correcting release is targeted soon. Thanks Erik.

I began to work on Debian packages in summer, to give something back to the community.
I looked for orphaned ones, that I used and that needed help. I found mpgtx, that I had already used to handle MPEG files and for MP3 tagging.
Because an active upstream developer is very useful for a package maintainer to do work on source code for requested features or found bugs, I asked Laurent, if he still work on it.
I got an very friendly answer. I saw a chance to use my knowledge in C++ and get experiences in working with other developers over Internet.
 
Let's see, that will happen. ;-)
Erik

November 24 2002

End of a four monthes long joke. The download links below still pointed (ahahah) to the old version 1.1. I guess I finally understood why so many people kept bothering with gcc 3.2 version errors. Sorry.

Gift of the day : mpgtx is now available for windows here. This is a first attempt, incomplete version : tagmp3 feature is disabled in windows version. You might want to take a look at the updated link section.

August 30 2002

mpgtx 1.3 released with major improvements and new features. Among these are support for mpeg2 encoded files and better playability of mpeg1 and mpeg2 chunks splitted by mpgtx. Also there is a GUI-wrapper for MacOSX available here.
 

March 5 2002

Daughter V.2.0 released. I'm proud to announce this major familial change. Her name is Salomé and she's cute. What it does mean for mpgtx is less time to code, less time to sleep. I'm sorry not to have time to answer to your mails, gimme a couple of monthes and I'll be back.
mpgtx is not dead but is being rewriten from scratch. It'll be a (handy) library. The most curious among you may want to take a look at it under libmpgtx on the CVS.
 

November 8 2001

Philipp Biermann provided me with a source and binary tree for macOS X. It's available Here as a contrib. Thank you Philipp.
 
I'm sorry to say that I'm currently overbooked writing my PhD thesis, please don't hope some radical changes in a near future. I'm actually thinking hard of mpgtx V.2. and I came to the point to consider mpgtx v1 as a fairly useable draft. But mpgtx currently suffers from a not-so-well-designed architecture. A good support for MPEG 2 and a planned support for MPEG 4 aren't seriously conceivable with this architecture. That's why I plan to rewrite it from scratch but it's a long term job. mpgtx v2 will be a MPEG library (yeah I know, yet another one) that'll make it handy to write a command line interface but also a GUI interface.
I'm currently trying to find the best architecture to handle any MPEG streams and any operations you can think of doing on MPEG streams. I've learned by my mistakes that this is the most important part of the developement. A good architecture makes anything straightforward. That's my goal. Wish me good luck.
 

October 2 2001

mpgtx 1.1 is out, supporting files larger than 2 GB.
This work on large file support is the courtesy of Mattias Sandgren (applause). (I mean Matt coded it all, my only contribution to his work are the bugs I added to his code, to make things funnier.)
Note that large file support only work for systems that... support large files. This means systems that comply with Single UNIX Specification 2.0. As for Linux, this means that you'll need at least a 2.4 kernel and Glibc 2.2. Support for older system is maintained.
 
Some bugs were fixed in this release, the most visible one being that nasty debug messages won't show up again.
 

July 23 2001

First stable release, mpgtx v 1.0 is out!
mpgtx seems to be fairly stable by now so here's the first milestone.
Fixed a bug in demultiplexer thank to Steven M Schultz and a gcc 3.0 compiler error thank to Fred Hernandez.

>>   mpgtx can currently split and join MPEG 1 video files and most MPEG audio files.
>>   mpgtx can fetch detailed informations from MPEG 1 and MPEG 2.
>>   mpgtx can demultiplex MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 files (System layer, Program layer and Transport Layer).
>>   mpgtx can add, remove and edit ID3 tags from mp3 files and rename mp3 files according to their ID3 tags.
 

<<   DivX ;) is not yet supported, neither is MPEG 4
<<   splitting and joining of MPEG 2 video files is experimental. (read "will work only in your wildest dreams")
<<   mpgtx can not multiplex audio and video into a system stream.
 

• You can find any older release of mpgtx here

• For l33+ c0d4z and those who want the freshest meat mpgtx cvs is (wide) open to you. Simply do a :
  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.mpgtx.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mpgtx login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.mpgtx.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mpgtx co mpgtx
  Okay this is not that simple.

mpgtx [mode] [options] file [file | range] ...

mpgtx has five fundamental modes :

• split mode (-s switch)

• join mode (-j switch)

• info mode (-i switch)

• demultiplex mode (-d switch)

• ID3 tag mode (-T switch)

When in split or demux mode, you may want to specify a basename to the output files, this is done with the -b BASENAME option.
 
When in join mode, you may want to specify the output file name, then use -o FILENAME.
Note that the special filename - can be used to specify standard output.
 
mpgtx uses ranges to find out which part of the file you want to split or join.
ranges is of the form [a-b] where a and b can be time values or file offset values.
 
Time Values are of the form HH:MM:SS.SSSS where the HH: part can be omited.
Offset Values are a number of bytes optionaly followed by the letter 'M' in which case offset is in Megabytes or 'k' offset is in kilobytes.
 
The first range must follow an MPEG file name.
 
Additionaly, half opened ranges can be specified to ensure that two chunks do not overlap :
[a-b] [b-c] produces two overlapping ranges (the b value is guaranteed to be part of each range) and
[a-b] ]b-c] do not overlap since b is contained in the first range only.
 
Examples:
myfile.mpg [35:14-1:22:00] corresponds to the range 35 mins 14 secs to 1 h 22 mins of file myfile.mpg
myfile.mpg [42000-520M] corresponds to the range 42000 bytes to 520 Megabytes of file myfile.mpg
 
Additionaly an empty value corresponds to the file boundary, thus
myfile.mpg [-520M] corresponds to the first 520 Megabytes of file myfile.mpg
myfile.mpg [3:20-] from 3 mins 20 second to the end of myfile.mpg
 
Another kind of range [part_number/total_parts] can be used
myfile.mpg [1/4] corresponds to the first quarter of myfile.mpg
 
You may also want to cut a file at a given boundary, mpgtx provide an additional syntax for it :
myfile.mpg {520M} defines two ranges : one from beginning of file to 520 Megabytes, the other from 520 Megabytes to the end of file.
Several dash separated values in ascending order can be specified, thus :
myfile.mpg {a-b-c} defines the four following ranges : [0-a] ]a-b] ]b-c] ]c-]
 

An ID3 tag is a chunk of extra informations such as artist name, album and genre. ID3 tags are displayed by most mp3 players.
ID3 tag mode supports this modes to help you sort your audio files :

tagmp3 show file

show file's ID3 tag.

tagmp3 set FORMAT file

sets file's ID3 tag according to FORMAT.

tagmp3 move FORMAT file

move file to a destination based on FORMAT.

tagmp3 del file

remove file's ID3 tag if any.

tagmp3 list

displays numeric music genres along with their meaning.

The format string is a character string composed of zero or more directives: ordinary characters (not %), which are not interpreted and conversion specifications, each of which results in the corresponding ID3 tag field substitution. Each conversion specification is introduced by the character %. The following lines describes each conversion specification along with its associated ID3 field. Special sequence %% is substituted with a single %.

%A

Artist Name

%a

Album Name

%t

Song Title

%T

Track Number

%y

Year

%g

Genre

%c

Comments

For set mode the format string is a list of ID3 fields followed by a ':' (next chars are the field value) or a '?' (ask user for field value)

example: tagmp3 set "%A:Pink Floyd %a:The Wall %t? %T?" *.mp3
For each mp3 of this directory, sets the artist name to Pink Floyd and the album to The Wall. For each file ask for the title and the track number. Leave the other fields untouched. Be aware that genre field require a numeric value. Known genres can be displayed with the list mode.

The format string is the destination path where each field identifier is substituted with the tag value.

example: tagmp3 move "/home/foo/mp3/%A/%a/%T-%t.mp3" *.mp3
with the set example above will move all mp3 to "/home/foo/mp3/Pink Floyd/The Wall/{track}-{title}.mp3"
If you prefer the "flat" naming scheme, you will use something like
tagmp3 move "%A-%t.mp3" *.mp3

mpgtx comes with four symbolic links which are mpgsplit, mpgcat, mpginfo and mpgjoin.
When called under these names, mpgtx will change its behaviour according to the following :

mpgsplit

is equivalent to mpgtx -s

mpgjoin

is equivalent to mpgtx -j

mpgcat

is equivalent to mpgtx -j -o -

mpginfo

is equivalent to mpgtx -i

mpgdemux

is equivalent to mpgtx -d

tagmp3

is equivalent to mpgtx -T

Enough with the theory, here comes action.

mpgtx -166 matrix-trailer.mpg -b mychunk
Now processing Chunk 1/166 ...  100.00%  
Now processing Chunk 2/166 ...  92.79%
     [...]
        
        

	

mpgtx -j file1 file2 file3 [-30M] [1:10:00-1:40:00] -o thejoinedfile.mpg
Now processing Chunk 1/4 ...  100.00%  
Now processing Chunk 2/4 ...  100.00%  
Now processing Chunk 3/4 ...  100.00%  
Now processing Chunk 4/4 ...  100.00%  
        
        

	

mpgtx -s movie.mpg [5:00-] -b without_intro
Now processing Chunk 1/1 ...  100.00%  
        
        

	

mpgtx -s file {699M} 
Now processing Chunk 1/2 ...  100.00%  
Now processing Chunk 2/2 ...  45.31%  
        
        

	

mpgtx -i mpegfile 
mpegfile:
  Mpeg 2 System File [Video/Audio]
  Estimated Duration: 01:38:29.51s
  Aspect ratio 4/3 (TV)
  Not interlaced, chroma format: 4:2:0
  Video Format: PAL
  Size [352 x 288]     25.00 fps    1.15 Mbps

User Data:
------------
encoded by TMPGEnc b12a
------------

  Audio : Mpeg 1 layer 2
  192 kbps  44100 Hz
  Stereo,  No emphasis

        
        

	

mpginfo weird.tx
weird.tx:
  Mpeg 2 Transport Stream [2 programs]
    Program N° 2 contains 2 Elementary Streams:
      Stream 1: MPEG 2 audio [pid: 59]
        audio version 2
      Stream 2: MPEG 2 video [pid: 58]
        video version 1
    Program N° 1 contains 2 Elementary Streams:
      Stream 1: MPEG 2 audio [pid: 57]
        audio version 2
      Stream 2: MPEG 2 video [pid: 56]
        video version 1
        
        

	

mpgdemux ../mmedia/teracom_3/Teracom_3 -b weird
 Demultiplexing : [Programs 02 audio 02  video 02] [100.00%]
        
        

	

• weird-2-1.mp3 (Program 2 stream 1)
• weird-2-2.m2v (Program 2 stream 2)
• weird-1-1.mp3 (Program 1 stream 1)
• weird-1-2.m2v (Program 1 stream 2)

mpgtx -i wagner.mp3
wagner.mp3
  Audio : Mpeg 2 layer 3
  Estimated Duration: 03:00.70s
  32 kbps  24000 Hz
  Frame size: 96 bytes
  Mono,  No emphasis,  original
  ID3 v1.1 tag
     ----------------
     title   : Der fliegende Hollander
     genre   : Other
     ----------------
  ID3 v2.3.0 tag (more info on http://www.id3.org/)
     ----------------
     TRCK : 01
     COMM : (lang: eng) : (empty)
     PCNT : (skipped)
     TLEN : 180000
     TCON : Richard Wagner
     TIT2 : Richard Wagner - Der fliegende Hollander
     ----------------
        
        

	

• Multiplexing of audio and video into a system file.

• Improved support to MPEG 2 video files.

• Get rid of the GOP limitation. Split on frame basis.

• Correct timelines. Sets wrong time stamps into right order.

• Support MPEG 4 and Divx ;).

• Improve info mode.

• Problems were reported about Windows Media Player.

• Full Bug list can be found here

• If you found a bug please help me to correct it : just submit it.

• mpgtx is a GOP based MPEG editor. A GOP is a Group Of Picture, typically 15 pictures for a duration of 0.5 second. So is mpgtx's accuracy.

• MPEG files joined with mpgtx can show artifacts at the splice point. This is not a bug from the editor but rather from the player. Technically mpgtx sets the Broken Link flag in the GOP header which tells the player to discard leading interpolated (B) frames. Some players will ignore this flag, thus displaying artifacts. mtv and mtvp are known to handle these files correctly. You can find these tools at www.mpegtv.com.

• Time ranges are currently computed on the duration estimation and the file size to produce offset ranges internally.