history

In 2010, I bought a Smart MX83 digital cable receiver with PVR. Of course, I also downloaded the transfer software - pc2box - from the Smart Electronic MX83 download page.

For a few years, I was quite happy with pc2box. In February, 2013 I did my first longer HD recording - a documentary, about 8 GiB in size - and found that converting this to TS format would not finish. At 24% (and an output file size of about 2 GiB) it got stuck.

Luckily, the download package comes with source code, so it was possible to find and fix the problem quite easily.

The problem is caused by a memory leak (a missing "free" statement in the pc2box210.zip version I downloaded 2013-09-23). The bug is in the code that transforms the custom REC format into TS (Transport Stream) format.

Still, I always wanted a small no-fluff command line tool to do a simple rec2ts format-translation job. This project and code is the result.