Explain: Muxer, Remux, Demux, Transmux, etc?

[Cood]

Could someone please clarify for me what all the differences in muxing are? I see Muxer, Remux, Demux, Transmux, etc. I assume one is for pulling "stuff" out of files and the other for putting stuff in. Does "stuff" include both video and audio, or just audio?

I am primarily working with m2ts files ripped from blurays, and would just like to have a better understanding of what I am doing to the files. I don't want to lose any quality. And I have a few seamless branching movies I need to put together now too.

Thanks for any information.

[garp99]

I've never heard of Transmux.

Muxer - program that pulls together video, audio, subtitles, or other related files (like subtitle font) into a new container (MKV or TS usually)

Demuxer - program that pulls apart the various contents of a container file like MKV or TS, not all parts need to be stripped out.

Remux - process of demuxing a container and muxing it back together in a different order, with new parts, or splitting the contents.

MKVmerge does muxing and demuxing of MKV files.
TSmerge does muxing and demuxing of TS files.

Hope that helps

[emveepee]

Probably you mean transcode. Why not try your favourite internet search engine? I'm sure you will find these terms at almost any depth quite readily.

Martin

[chris57]

Remember that demux, remux or muxing is not losing any quality as its only repackaging the audio and video streams. Takes a short time period as well.
Anything with trans in the title I would be wary of as it usually involves transcoding or rencoding which means a quality loss and time.

[Darkstar]

Hi,
maybe its good to start a little bit more basic in order to understand what is meant instead of just knowing:
MUX is the short form for multiplex. Wikipedia gives you one definition:

Quote:Multiplexing, combining many signals into a single transmission circuit or channel

The "movie" you doubleclick on in your explorer is actually a container, that contains a video stream, one or more audio streams and maybe also other streams like subtitles or teletext. In order to have picture and sound at the same time you need to devide the streams into many small samples and store them in a single file: a piece of video, a piece of audio, a piece of video and so on. This is multiplexing. When you then play the movie (AVI,MKV,TS or whatever) the file is first demultiplexed (demuxed) and the single streams are sent to the video output device and the audio output device. As said before: remuxing is the process of demultiplexing and again multiplexing the different streams and as long as you don't change your audio/video streams inbetween you won't loose quality.

Darkstar.

[Cood]

That helped a lot... Thanks for all the info guys.