Great program (Free!) for Converting CS8100HD Files

[DiscoLoveGrapes]

Before they went south, it seemed like the Coolsat 8100HD was the ideal box for FTAers -- at least before AZBox. The one issue people have with it seems to be converting those weirdo TP files to something usable.

While VideoReDo is great, another option is to use Format Factory - and convert to AVI. I was able to produce a 720p file from a 10 minute file (and reduce the size from 2.5GB to 100MB!) using this free tool. Converting straight to MPG was a little choppy, but that may have been just me.

You can Google it and there's no crapware on it, although you will have to tell it not to put a link to Ebay on the desktop.

 

[Tron]

Does the 8100 use some strange file format, or does it just record a standard transport stream with some sort of header information on the file? The Visionsat IV-200 records standard transport stream files, but most apps will not play the files on a PC without remuxing them first. This gets rid of the header information that the Visionsat IV-200 PVR software uses, but the remuxed files play back without issues.

 

[DiscoLoveGrapes]

I'm guessing it's just some odd header info, and I'm pretty sure it's just a normal MPEG-2 (or MPEG-4, for those signals) film underneath. It's just that nothing seems to play with it except for a small handful of programs.

IIRC, you can get the files off a Visionsat to work with VLC and they'll convert with other programs.