MPEG-2 Transport Stream Packaging for Media over QUIC Transport(www.ietf.org)
52 pointsby mondainx7 hours ago5 comments
  • mondainx4 hours ago
    Try not to confuse container vs codec. M2TS can carry a plethora of content and is very widely used these days, in the streaming world.
    • lxgr2 hours ago
      Including IP (over DOCSIS), I believe!
  • Almondsetat4 hours ago
    Is MPEG-2 still used over h264 for things that would justify this RFC in 2026?
    • koito174 hours ago
      MPEG-2 TS is a container. H.264 is a coding specification. They are totally different things.

      One can find MPEG-2 TS in surprising places (see: DOCSIS encapsulating Ethernet frames into TS packets).

      If I had to guess why MPEG-2 TS, it'd probably be the for the fact it's a well-supported streaming format in both hardware and software. If you tried using QuickTime or MPEG-4 containers, you'd have to rely on hacks like ensuring the moov atom preceeds mdat.

      Matroska may be worth considering (especially the subset used by WebM to make it stream-friendly and quicker to seek), but no idea how widespread hardware support is for (de)muxing that.

      • TD-Linux42 minutes ago
        Hardware support does not matter for TS, as containers are handled in software.

        Fast start is irrelevant because MoQ normally uses fragmented MP4, not progressive.

      • dylan6044 hours ago
        Before ProRes, we captured HD content at 100Mbps MPEG2 video with PCM audio wrapped in a 302m stream that were muxed together as an MP2TS wrapper. The 302m made it even more difficult as not all MP2TS tools could do it correctly, and some would not allow for custom Program stream IDs and needed to be remuxed by other tools allow for custom PIDs as a post process.

        But seeing how many uses people came up with for using MP2TS just shows it's flexibility and resilience.

    • conradev4 hours ago
      MPEG-TS is used to contain h264 chunks for HLS. MPEG-DASH and the new CMAF standard use fMP4 containers instead. My personal take is that Media over QUIC (MoQ) should support both.
      • TD-Linuxan hour ago
        HLS also supports fMP4 now and no one is making new services that use TS (there are some old ones still around with too much friction to switch)
    • 4 hours ago
      undefined
    • lxgr2 hours ago
      No, but under it ;)
  • quapster4 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • yulia_dev_la4 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • wmf5 hours ago
    This looks like a kludge that should be used as a last resort. Transport Stream is not for the Internet.
    • heyitsdaad4 hours ago
      The Internet you are referring to is not meant for low latency streaming. This is what it takes make it low latency. MPEGTS is proven stable and ubiquitous. If only it has less overhead.
    • dylan6045 hours ago
      Transport stream is specifically meant for unstable connections vs Program streams used for DVDs with a nice steady data stream. Digital cable signals and other signals use transport streams specifically because they can resync if things do get out of sync.

      But yes, working with TS feels kludgy. I haven't had to deal with them in over a decade, but there was one tool that made it all super easy, MP2TSME, that I hear is no longer available

    • iso163120 minutes ago
      I'm been using MPEG2 transport streams over the internet to broadcast programs to millions of people for over 15 years, and of course over private IP networks.

      I'm almost certain you've seen some of that output

    • lxgr2 hours ago
      Transport Stream is for everything, which includes the Internet.