MPEG-2 Transport Streams have in recent years transitioned from ASI or SMPTE 310M interfaces to Ethernet typically encapsulated as multicast UDP, RTP or an extension of RTP such as Harmonic's HRTP. Often we capture these streams with a tool like Wireshark and save them as PCAP or it's newer cousin PcapNg.

However, once captured, these streams can be tricky to use with programs like TSReader. We don't support PCAP/PcapNg directly in TSReader for a whole number of reasons, extracting streams from Wireshark can be very time consuming (especially if there are multiple streams in the PCAP/PcapNG file) and playback applications such as Colasoft's Packet Player are very useful however, they can be tricky to configure correctly.

So starting with TSReader Standard and Professional 2.8.56, we're including a utility to make extracting multicast transport streams in UDP, RTP or HRTP formats from PCAP and PcapNg files much simpler.

To use PCAPtoTS, just add the name of the PCAP/PcapNg file. For example:

  pcaptots c:\captures\capture.pcap

PCAPtoTS will search through the file and if appropriate transport streams are found, they will be written to a directory in the same folder as the PCAP/PcapNg file with a name that represents the stream address. Imagine that the capture.pcap file shown above contains the following transport streams:

  192.168.0.1:5000 -> 224.0.0.1:4000
  192.168.0.1:5001 -> 224.0.0.2:4000

The result will be a folder c:\captures\capture containing these files:

  192.168.0.1;5000-224.0.0.1;4000.ts
  192.168.0.1;5001-224.0.0.2;4000.ts

Note that we had to replace the usual address:port format with address;port format since Windows does not allow file names with the : character.

Once extracted, these resulting files can then be inspected with TSReader using the file source module.

By default, PCAPtoTS will only extract multicast UDP/RTP streams but this can be overridden to support unicast by adding the -u switch:

  pcaptots -u c:\capture\capture.pcap