[FFmpeg-user] What o do with data streams

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 01:32:16 +0100, Ulf Zibis wrote:
> with "-map 0" from a vob stream I get a data stream:
>    Stream #0:6[0x200bf]: Data: dvd_nav_packet
> (please forgive, that I don't paste the whole output here, it's a
> general question.)
> 
> As there is no format specifier for this, is it possible to save the raw
> data to an arbitrary file?

As far as I know, you can dump any kind of stream by using streamcopy
and the "rawvideo" muxer. You'll get a binary representation of the
stream. Caveat: You lose all correlation of data chunks to the
timestamps of the packets they were contained in. This may or may not
be important.

$ ffmpeg -i input -map 0:N -c copy -f rawvideo data.bin

There was a patch on the ffmpeg-devel mailing list [*] which provides
the fftextdata muxer (and demuxer), but this patch was never accepted.
The fftextdata format dumps each packet's binary content as base64
textual representation, along with the packet's timestamp. This dump
can be decoded by some postprocessing, or it can be fed back to the
fftextdata muxer. To my knowledge, this is the only method to retain
all (well, much, not all) information about an arbitrary stream.

I'm not sure there's much use for the content of these dumps in most
cases. I have managed to decode timed_id3 metadata through this
though.

Moritz

[*] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2016-May/194445.html