Recording from Telekom IPTV to DVD

Some days ago, my father asked me if I could record TROY for him, which was broadcasted around Christmas 2009 by a public TV station. As I am a customer of T-Entertainment (the IPTV solution from Deutsche Telekom) I suffer from getting my recordings out of my media receiver box onto a shared medium. Anyhow, I heard from a colleague of mine that you can watch IPTV using the VLC player - as long as you are a customer of T-Entertainemt of course ;) Additionally, the public TV stations had an HDTV showcase during Christmas and years eve and so I thought I should give it a try and record the stream in HDTV.

So I started searching for the multicast address of the HDTV stream and found it somewhere in the web. I started VLC and opened File -> Network and entered the multicast RTP information using ‘Open RTP/UDP Stream’. After this, I started the Streaming/Exporting Wizard and select the currently active stream as the source. By that, I simply dumped the MPEG-TS stream onto my local hard drive.

After the movie has ended, I could open the transport stream with VLC. The next step now was to convert the HDTV MPEG-TS stream, which contained H.264 video and MPEG Layer 2 audio to a DVD compatible format. I tried several tools, e.g. Toast 10 Titanium, Movie Gate 2, ffmpegX, mencoder and transcode, but none of them produced a satisfying output. The final choice was so simple, that it is almost embarrassing to note. But so what, it was the reason that I started this blog entry and so here it is:

ffmpeg -i troja.ts -target pal-dvd troja.mpg

After that, I still had to re-quantize the video stream, but anyhow - it worked at least :)

That’s it and cheers,
iss