MPEG-2 Transport Stream utility library

A fast, cross-platform and modern C++ SDK for all your MPEG-2 transport stream media format needs following international specification ISO/IEC 13818-1. The standard is also called H.222 including both TS and PS. The library is platform independent only using C++11. Mpeg2ts has been tested on the following operating systems:

• Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS)
• Windows (Windows 10)
• Mac OS X (Sierra, Catalina, BigSur)

and following architectures:

• x86
• amd64
• Apple M1

To simplify the build process on all these operating systems, CMake is being used.

Cross platform Artifacts:

Win32: mpeg2ts.dll mpeg2ts.lib
Linux: libmpeg2ts.so libmpeg2ts.a
Apple: libmpeg2ts.dylib libmpeg2ts.a
All OS: mpeg2ts.h

Sample Applications:

Win32: TsUtilities located under samples
(Note: You need copy it's dependency mpeg2ts.dll to where you
installed/built the sample_tsutilities.exe)
Linux: tsparser

In order to parse mpeg2 and h264 codecs, 2 extra libs are supplied. In total there are the 3 following libs:

Lib name	Meaning
libmpeg2ts.so	mpeg2 transport stream parser
libmpeg2codec.so	mpeg2 codec parser
libh264codec.so	h264 codec parser

Requirements

C++11 is the minimal requirement. The library is written as platform independent code and tested on Mac OS X (Sierra), Ubuntu 16.04/18.04, Windows 10.

SW Architecture

There are 2 sets of APIs, the core API called mpeg2ts under the same namespace and a utility API to facilitate the usage of the API for more convinient usage (namespace tsutil). These are the APIs:

• mpeg2ts.h The core and fundamental API for all mpeg2ts usage
• TsUtilities.h High level API to simplify usage
• Samples in samples/ shows how to use the tsutil API

Building

To simplify the crosscompile process we use CMake. Under Linux, Mac and Windows just do this:

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug|Release ..
cmake --build .

You will get the following artifacts:

libmpeg2ts.a
tsparser*

To also build the shared libraries you need to tell CMake to build those:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug|Release -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=YES ..

which result in libmpeg2ts.so* on Linux, libmpeg2ts.dylib* on Mac and libmpeg2ts.dll* on Windows.

If you wanna speed up the build you can type cmake --build . -- -j$(nproc) in the 4th command above (Works only on Mac/Linux).

Installation

In order to install this library you can type:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install ..
cmake --build .
cmake --build . --target install

and now you will find the installed libraries and headers in install directory. Omit CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to install in system default /usr/local/lib.

Packaging

To generate a package with both debug and release build type (Mac & Linux):

./gen_package.sh

or on Windows

./gen_package.bat

This will generate a package

mpeg2ts-0.5.0-Linux.tar.gz   (Linux)
mpeg2ts-0.5.0-Darwin.tar.gz  (Apple)
mpeg2ts-0.5.0-win32.zip      (Windows)

for example containing only shared libs.

Usage in other CMake projects

To find this package using CMake simply use find_package:

find_package(mpeg2ts REQUIRED)

target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC mpeg2ts::mpeg2ts)

If you want to use mpeg2ts lib installation with your project you need to set the CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to where mpeg2ts-lib is being installed if it wasn't installed host under your system (/usr/local).

Settings

Edit the settings.json file to change log level, log file name and other properties. These are global settings for the mpeg2ts set of libraries. Log levels are:

VERBOSE
DEBUG
INFO
WARNING
ERROR
FATAL
NONE

where VERBOSE is the maximum log output as compared to NONE which generates no output. The default log output file is mpeg2ts_log.csv in csv style for easier use.

Apps

For more info on how to use the apps like tsparser or h264parser please check README.

Docker

To simplify building mpeg2ts, building dependencies and tools have been bundled into a docker container. This image can be build locally or downloaded from docker hub. To start using docker commands, simplest is to source the tool

source docker/docker-commands.sh

Check README for more information.

Tests

In order to run all tests just type (currently only available under Linux):

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DENABLE_TESTS=ON -DENABLE_COMPONENT_TESTS=ON ..

Building:

make -j $(nproc)
make component-tests
make component-benchmark-tests
make unit-tests

This will run component tests, benchmark and unit-tests. Component tests are developed via pytest while the unit tests are via google tests/mocks (gtest). The different layers like API, and tsutilities are tested as a component (the whole library as such) while class functions are tested as a unit. virtualenv is required for running component tests.

Windows

Since CMake is used for cross platform build, you first need install CMake on your Windows system if you havent done that already.

Visual Studio 2017

To open the CMake project under Windows you need at least Visual Studio 2017 with CMake support (make sure you installed CMake support). Open the root CMakeLists.txt project file and you are ready to build under Windows.

VS Code

To open the CMake project by VS Code under Windows, just open the root folder. Select the supplied Kit (CMake & CMake Tools plugins are required) to simplify builds with predefined options. Existing kits are:

Kit name	Meaning
Windows-SharedLib-VS2017-x64	64 bits build DLL on Windows, no tests
Windows-SharedLib-VS2017-x86	32 bits build DLL on Windows, no tests
Windows-Gtests-StaticLib-VS2017-x86	32 bits build gtests/benchmarch on Windows
Windows-Gtests-StaticLib-VS2017-x64	64 bits build gtests/benchmarch on Windows

Currently there is a bug in gmock which only make it possible to link statically and not dynamically with gmock hence the reason for the Windows-Gtests-StaticLib-VS2017-x86.

Visual Studio prior 2017

To cross compile for older VS versions, use powershell and cmake command line with a generator, for example:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" --arch "x86" -DENABLE_TESTS=OFF -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF ..

Possible VS generators are:

Generators	Meaning
Visual Studio 15 2017 [arch]	Generates Visual Studio 2017 project files.
Visual Studio 14 2015 [arch]	Generates Visual Studio 2015 project files.
Visual Studio 12 2013 [arch]	Generates Visual Studio 2013 project files.
Visual Studio 11 2012 [arch]	Generates Visual Studio 2012 project files.
Visual Studio 10 2010 [arch]	Generates Visual Studio 2010 project files.
Visual Studio 9 2008 [arch]	Generates Visual Studio 2008 project files.

where arch can be x86, Win64 or ARM. To build your new solution type:

cmake --build .
or
cmake --build . --target mpeg2ts

Generate Release

Run the

./gen_package.bat

to create a new release on Windows via CMake and CPack.

Continuous integration (CI)

For CI mpeg2ts use CircleCI which will automatically run all unit tests after a commit either in a branch, pull-request or integration to master. You can check the status tests in any branch by the portal: CircleCI

Static code analysis

Use make cppcheck and make clang-tidy. This however requires one to have installed either cppcheck or clang-tidy on you host machine. If that is not the case, then we recommend using docker interactive via:

source docker/docker-commands.sh
docker-interactive
docker@1ca...: make cppcheck