Simple and efficient multicast and transport stream manipulation
The multicat package contains a set of tools designed to easily and efficiently manipulate multicast streams in general, and MPEG-2 Transport Streams (ISO/IEC 13818-1) in particular.
The multicat suite of applications is very lightweight and designed to operate in tight environments. Memory and CPU usages are kept to a minimum, and they feature only one thread of execution. It is designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
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Simple and efficient multicast and transport stream manipulation
The multicat package contains a set of tools designed to easily and efficiently manipulate multicast streams in general, and MPEG-2 Transport Streams (ISO/IEC 13818-1) in particular.
The multicat suite of applications is very lightweight and designed to operate in tight environments. Memory and CPU usages are kept to a minimum, and they feature only one thread of execution. It is designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
The multicat program
multicat itself is a 1 input/1 output application. Inputs and outputs can be network streams (unicast and multicast), files, directories, character devices or FIFOs. It is thought to be a multicast equivalent of the popular netcat tool. Typical applications are recording live transport streams, or playing out TS files without modification. Also it is able to record a continuous stream into a directory, rotate the files periodically, and make seamless extracts from it.
Multicat tries to rebuild the internal clock of the input stream; but it wants to remain agnostic of what is transported, so in case of files the said clock is stored to an auxiliary file (example.aux accompanies example.ts) while recording. Other inputs are considered "live", and the input clock is simply derived from the reception time of the packets.
