I have a digital TV recorder. It saves recordings in a directory named for the show I am recording e.g. 'ABC1-01012014-2210-ABC News Late Edition.pvr', as a sequence of .ts files e.g. 'data0001.ts' , 'data0002.ts', 'data0003.ts' and a text file called 'MM_PLAY_TIME.ini'.

A web search indicated that .ts files are MPEG2 Transport Stream files and can be converted to MPEG2 Program Stream (.ps) files, for better interoperability with a wide range of players.

I can play all the .ts files, sequentially, on my Fedora 19 box, using VLC Media Player, but is there a way to stitch them together into a single file, so I can see the whole program without interruption?

If I can get that far, I believe a tool like avidemux will allow me to convert the file to .ps - does that sound right?

Any help would be appreciated.

There is a video editor for GNU/Linux, Openshot, with that you may be able to merge the videos. It is probably available in Fedora repositories.

Regards

Thanks ukiuki. I will explore Openshot and see what it can do.

I would think concatenating them with 'cat' might work. No harm in trying, just output to a different file.

Thanks, metaschima. Unfortunately, each of the first three files is 2.1Gb, so cat tries to create a humungous file, which does not work on my 32 bit platform. I only know, because I tried and it went 'bang' <grin>.

Hmmmm .... I was wrong about the file size issue. I used avidemux, which opened the first file in the sequence and noticed the rest were sequentially numbered, so offered to open them all. I did this, set the output format to 'Mpeg-PS Muxer(ff)' and chose to 'Save', which asked for a target filename, then happily created a 6.5Gb file out of it. I have yet to play the file, so cannot assert everything went well, but the indications so far are good.

If the new file plays nicely, I will try using Openshot, to trim the opening and closing extra few minutes I recorded, to make sure I captured the whole movie. So far, so good.

In Linux a simple "cat file2.ts >> file1.ts" will add file2.ts to the end of file1.ts.

Well, OpenShot just died when I tried to play the file, so I used avidemux to trim the unwanted parts and ended up with a three-hour movie, which is what I wanted.

Thanks all for your help

Sequel:

The movie I eneded up with was a 5.8Gb file. To shrink it to fit a DVD, I used ffmpeg and specified a lower bit rate per second. As this was going to be a shrunk file, I told ffmpeg to output to 'shrunk.mpg'. When I was sure it was small enough (4.7Gb), I checked that Brasero would accept it for writing to a DVD. Brasero was happy with 'shrunk.mpg', but when I renamed the file to '<real movie name>.mpg', Braseo reported the error "<real movie name.mpg> is not suitable for audio or video media". I renamed it back to 'shrunk.mpg' and Brasero was happy again, so it seems Brasero checks the content of the file, to ensure some internal identifier matches the filename. Weird, to a newbie, but glad it is solved.

For the sake of anyone following this thread, the ffmpeg command line I used, to shrink a 5.8Gb file at 4150 kbits per second, to a 4.7Gb file, was:
ffmpeg -i <big filename>.mpg -c:v mpeg2video -b:v 3200k shrunk.mpg

Incidentally, I first tried limiting the file size by using the file size limit option to ffmpeg as '-fs 4700MiB', but this option was ignored, which is why I had to play around with the bit rate, until I ended up with an output file small enough to burn to DVD. Of course, I may have used incorrect syntax for this option, but I checked that it follows what the man page said. Also, first attempts had ffmpeg convert the output to mpeg1video, which is why I had to specify mpeg2video for the video stream. Curious.

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This guy right here has the answer. No crazy software needed.

cat file1.ts file2.ts file3.ts file4.ts > full_video.ts

Done.

Thanks CaptSaltyJack. I was unsure if video files contained any wrappers or similar to specify their start and end points, in which case a simple cat might have resulted in unreadable output. I'm glad to have it clarified. "8-)

Actually, this is often a concern. It will likely work, but you won't be able to seek, files will play far past their limit (cat 2 30sec files together and you get a clip that says it's 30 sec long but plays for 60 sec)
This is with files that aren't intended to be split or combined (eg mp4, ogg, mp3)
If your files were split after being encoded, the below doesn't apply.

I would consider cat the quick & dirty fix - since it works, but I would suggest using ffmpeg to put them together is you want it to look nice

Here's a guide.
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate

Strange, I used the cat method to concatenate 500 separate TS files together, then load into Adobe Premiere to export as MP4. Worked totally fine. Maybe I got lucky.

Will use ffmpeg next time, thanks for the tip!

It's important to consider when / why it's being split or combined.

I'm not familiar with .ts files, but if they are simply a sequential organized parts of a file with the first containing all info needed, concatenating them is fine (& the right thing to do)
On the other hand, concatenating a ogg file with another will likely make it work until the first song ends - then do something (good or bad)
Then using ffmpeg to re-write the correct info is the right thing to do in that scenario.

From the OP, it looks like they were mpeg2 files, so I would go with ffmpeg.
However, if a simple cat did it & there's no issues with seek or anything - go with it (it's easier).

TS = MPEG2 parts.

Any seek issues would've been eliminated when I converted it to H.264 MP4, I would think?