[vlc] Failure to play MPEG2 TS assembled by non-VLC muxer

[Warren Young]

We have a video here that was remuxed from a MPEG-2 PS original into TS 
format by Elecard's XMuxer Pro.  Every MPEG-2 TS player we have here[*] 
will play it correctly except for VLC.  (Using 0.8.6f.)

VLC doesn't show any error messages, but you don't see any video or hear 
any audio.  You only see the playback position slider control move as it 
progresses through the stream.  The slider moves much faster than real 
time; I suspect it's moving as fast as it can process the data.  Nothing 
appears in the Messages window during playback.  When it hits the end of 
the stream, this appears:

ts debug: eof ?
main debug: EOF reached
main debug: closing input
ts debug: pid list:
ts debug:   - pid[0] seen
ts debug:   - pid[16] seen
ts debug:   - pid[17] seen
ts debug:   - pid[18] seen
ts debug:   - pid[8191] seen
main debug: removing module "ts"
main debug: removing module "access_file"
main debug: thread times: real 0m4.296875s, kernel 0m0.562500s, user 
0m0.125000s
main debug: thread 3944 joined (input/input.c:412)
main: nothing to play

PID 16 and 18 are the video and audio streams, respectively.  I 
understand that 8191 is for padding.  I don't know what the others are.

I've uploaded the first half minute of the clip here:

	http://etr-usa.com/vlc/5e-clip.ts

You might ask why we don't use VLC as our PS -> TS remuxer.  This does 
work fine, but XMuxer Pro has other advantages, so we want to try to get 
it working.

If I demux this stream with XMuxer Pro and then remux it from the 
elementary streams using either XMuxer or VLC, VLC will then play it 
correctly.  There is clearly some difference between remux from PS and 
mux from ES in the Elecard product.  This gives us a workaround, but 
it's still the case that other players don't seem to care about this 
difference.  Only VLC seems to care.  Why?

[*] The other players we've tried are MPlayer, an ancient version of 
Elecard's MPEG-2 player, and an uncommon player you've probably never 
heard of called PackeTV.  We've also streamed it to an AmiNET 130H 
hardware player, which also plays it, but A/V sync slips over time. 
This may be a quirk of the Amino, though, since none of the other 
players slip.