TSDuck, the MPEG Transport Stream Toolkit, provides some simple utilities to process MPEG Transport Streams (TS), either as recorded files or live streams.

TSDuck - The MPEG Transport Stream Toolkit

Abstract

TSDuck is an extensible toolkit for MPEG transport streams.

TSDuck is used in digital television systems for test, monitoring, integration, debug, lab or demo.

In practice, TSDuck is used for:

Transport stream acquisition or transmodulation, including DVB, ATSC, ISDB, ASI and IP multicast.
Analyze transport streams, PSI/SI signalization, bitrates, timestamps.
On-the-fly transformation or injection of content and signalization.
- Manipulation of tables and descriptors using XML, JSON or binary formats.
- Most standard tables and descriptors are supported, as defined by MPEG, DVB, ISDB, ATSC, SCTE.
Modify, remove, rename, extract services.
Monitor and report conditions on the stream (video and audio properties, bitrates, crypto-periods, signalization).
Work on live transport streams, DVB-S/C/T, ATSC, ISDB-S/T, ASI, UDP ("IP-TV"), HTTP, HLS, SRT, RIST or offline transport stream files and pcap network capture files.
Receive from or send to specialized hardware such as:
- Cheap DVB, ATSC or ISDB tuners (USB, PCI).
- Professional Dektec devices, ASI, modulators (USB, PCI).
- HiDes modulators (USB).
- VATek-based modulators (USB) such as the Suntechtv U3.
Re-route transport streams to other applications.
Extract or inject Multi-Protocol Encapsulation (MPE) between TS and UDP/IP.
Analyze and inject SCTE 35 splice information.
Extract specific encapsulated data (Teletext, T2-MI).
Emulate a CAS head-end using DVB SimulCrypt interfaces to and from ECMG or EMMG.
And more...

TSDuck is developed in C++ in a modular architecture. It is easy to extend through plugins.

TSDuck is simple; it is a collection of command line tools and plugins. There is no sophisticated GUI. Each utility or plugin performs only one elementary feature but they can be combined in any order.

Through tsp, the Transport Stream Processor, many types of analysis and transformation can be applied on live or recorded transport streams. This utility can be extended through plugins. Existing plugins can be enhanced and new plugins can be developed using a library of C++ classes.

Usage

TSDuck comes with a comprehensive User's Guide.

All utilities and plugins accept the option --help to display their syntax.

TSDuck is developed in C++, using modern C++20 coding practices. For programmers, TSDuck provides a large collection of C++ classes in one single library. These classes manipulate, in a completely portable way, MPEG transport streams, MPEG/DVB/ATSC/ISDB signalization and many other features. See the Developer's Guide and the Programming Reference.

Python and Java bindings exist to allow running transport stream processing pipelines from Python or Java applications.

Building

TSDuck can be built on Windows, Linux, macOS and BSD systems. The primary target architectures are Intel x86_64 and Arm64 but TSDuck is regularly built and tested on x86, Arm32, RISC-V, PowerPC or IBM s390x. See the building section in the developer's guide for more details.

Download

On macOS, use the Homebrew packager: brew install tsduck
On Windows, use winget: winget install tsduck

Pre-built binary packages are available for Windows and the very latest versions of some Linux distros (Fedora, RedHat and clones, Ubuntu, Debian), on Intel x64 and Arm64 architectures.

The latest developments can be tested using nightly builds.

The command tsversion --check can be used to check if a new version of TSDuck is available online. The command tsversion --upgrade downloads the latest binaries for the current operating system and upgrades TSDuck.

Project resources

TSDuck is maintained by one single developer on spare time and on personal expenses. You may consider contributing to the hardware and Web hosting costs using

License

TSDuck is distributed under the terms of the Simplified 2-Clause BSD License. See the file LICENSE.txt for details.

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