A Transport Stream packet is a fixed length packet, there are a few Transport Stream packet sizes to be aware of:

• 188 Transport Stream
• 192 Transport Stream + 4 bit Timecode (MT2S Blu Ray)
• 204 Transport Stream + FEC (DVB-T/C/S)
• 208 Transport Stream + FEC (ATSC 8-VSB, 208)
• 208 Transport Stream + Reed Solomon (ATSC)

Transport Stream Packets are the basic units of a Transport Stream, each TS packet starts with a Sync Byte (0x47) and this is used to identify each packet (so 0x47 shouldn’t be used elsewhere in the packet).

Each TS packet has a 32 bit header, shown below.



The TS Header above (also called the TS 4 Byte Prefix) is from a real TS packet, below is the TS header in Hex.

Name			Bits	Bin		Hex	Dec		Description

Sync Byte		8	01000111	0x47		Sync Byte
TS Error			1	0		0x00		Error indicator (0=No Error, 1=Error)
Start Indicator		1	0		0x00		1 means start of PES or PSI otherwise 0
Transport Priority		1	0		0x00		see table below
PID			13	1111111111111	1FFF	8191	PID is 8191 (1FFF) = stuffing packet
Scrambling		2	00		0x00		00 = not scrambled
Adaptation Field Exist	2	01		0x01		01 means no adaptation fields
CC Counter		4	1001		0x09		continuity counter

Total			32