Multicat

Simple and efficient multicast and transport stream manipulation

multicat is a 1 input/1 output application. Inputs and outputs can be network streams unicast and multicast, files, directories, character devices or FIFOs. It is thought to be a multicast equivalent of the popular netcat tool. Typical applications are recording live transport streams, or playing out TS files without modification. Also it is able to record a continuous stream into a directory, rotate the files periodically, and make seamless extracts from it.

Multicat tries to rebuild the internal clock of the input stream; but it wants to remain agnostic of what is transported, so in case of files the said clock is stored to an auxiliary file example.aux accompanies example.ts while recording. Other inputs are considered “live”, and the input clock is simply derived from the reception time of the packets.