tsMuxeR 2.15.0

Combining separate video, audio and subtitle streams into one playable file should not cost you an evening or any picture quality.

tsMuxeR 2.15.0 does it in minutes, on Windows, Mac and Linux, for free.

It repacks the streams you already have into a TS, M2TS, MKV or burnable Blu-ray image without re-encoding a single frame, which is why the output is identical to the source rather than a generation removed from it.

Muxing Is Not Converting, And The Difference Is Hours

This is the part worth understanding before anything else, because it is where most confusion starts.

Converting means decoding your video and encoding it again, usually into a smaller file. It takes hours, it uses the whole processor, and the result is always slightly worse than what you started with.

Muxing just rewrites the wrapper. The video and audio data pass through untouched, so the job is limited by how fast your drive can copy, and quality loss is exactly zero.

Tools like HandBrake and Shutter Encoder do the first thing. tsMuxeR does the second. If you are trying to make a file smaller, you want them, not this.

The GUI And The Command Line Are The Same Download

There is no separate tsMuxerGUI package to hunt for any more, which trips up a lot of people arriving from old forum posts.

One zip contains both programs. Run tsMuxerGUI.exe for the window with the track list, or tsMuxeR.exe if you would rather drive it from a script or a batch file.

The interface is plain but it does the whole job: load your files, tick the tracks you want, pick the output type, press Start. Anything the GUI can do is also a switch on the command line, and the meta file it builds is visible and editable in the window before you commit.

It also speaks eight languages, including German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, so the labels are not a barrier if English is not your first language.

Which Formats It Handles

On the video side tsMuxeR covers H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, H.266/VVC in an alpha state, AV1 with full AOM specification compliance, Microsoft VC-1 and MPEG-2.

Audio runs to AAC, AC3 and E-AC3, Dolby TrueHD with its AC3 core, DTS and DTS-HD, MPEG audio layers 1 to 3, LPCM, plus Opus and FLAC for Matroska output.

Subtitles cover PGS, the image-based format Blu-ray discs use, and SRT text subtitles. tsMuxeR will convert SRT to PGS and lets you set font, colour and size with HTML-style tags on the way through.

For fixing the subtitle file itself before it goes in, Subtitle Edit is the better tool. If you are not certain what your source file actually contains, the free online codec finder identifies it in a few seconds.

4K, HDR And Dolby Vision

tsMuxeR carries HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision metadata through to the output, which is the thing that separates it from most general-purpose muxers.

That matters because a remux that drops the HDR metadata gives you a flat, washed-out picture on an HDR display even though every byte of video survived.

On a dual-layer Dolby Vision title the track list now tells you which of the two HEVC streams actually carries the Dolby Vision data, instead of showing two near-identical rows and leaving you to work it out. It also handles 3D Blu-ray, and can write a compliant Blu-ray disc folder or an AVCHD folder directly.

Burning It Back To A Disc

This is the newest part of the program and the reason a lot of people have switched back to it.

tsMuxeR now takes a finished BDMV folder and builds a burnable ISO from it, on its own tab. Pick your disc from the list - BD-R DL 50 GB, BD-RE DL 50 GB, BD-R XL 100 GB or BD-R XL 128 GB - and it fills in the capacity and works out the layer break for you.

The layer break is where dual-layer burns usually go wrong, because the disc surface is often faulty right at the transition. tsMuxeR pads a guard zone around that point with empty space, defaulting to 288 MB, so the defective region swallows padding instead of your film.

It also tries to place the break between two files rather than through the middle of one, and writes a short report next to the image telling you the playback time where the break landed, so you know which minute to spot-check on a player.

You still need ImgBurn or similar to write the ISO to the disc, but you no longer need it to measure the disc first. If your target is AVCHD on standard DVD media instead, BDtoAVCHD automates that path and brings its own encoders.

Where tsMuxeR Fits In A Blu-ray Archival Pipeline

tsMuxeR is rarely a standalone tool. It lives in the middle of a multi-stage workflow.

A typical 4K Blu-ray backup runs like this. Rip the disc with MakeMKV to get a lossless MKV, then demux and convert audio with eac3to if you need track-level control.

Check the stream parameters with MediaInfo so you know exactly what you are holding, then bring it all back together in tsMuxeR as the final TS, M2TS or Blu-ray disc structure.

Our guide to using MakeMKV for free covers the ripping stage in detail, which is the step most people get stuck on first.

Stream Editing Without Re-encoding

Beyond straight muxing, tsMuxeR does a set of jobs that would otherwise mean a full re-encode.

You can join several source files into one output, split the output by size, trim segments, and shift audio or subtitle tracks in time to fix sync. For TS, M2TS, MPG, VOB and EVO sources it detects audio delay by itself, which saves a lot of manual trial and error.

When it demuxes an audio track it now writes the delay into the file name, the same way eac3to does, so the offset survives the round trip instead of coming back at zero and putting your sound out of step.

It will also extract the DTS core from a DTS-HD stream, or the AC3 core from TrueHD, which is what you want when the target is an older receiver or a hardware player that chokes on the full lossless track.

For H.264 material there is granular control over SEI and SPS/PPS elements, NAL unit delimiter insertion and level adjustment. Most people never touch these. The people who need them rarely find them anywhere else.

What Changed In 2.15.0

Version 2.15.0 arrived on 8 August 2026, and it is a correctness release rather than a feature one.

• HDR10 mastering brightness is written into UHD playlists correctly. The maximum and minimum had been swapped.
• A demuxed audio track keeps its delay in the file name, so remuxing it puts the sound back where it belongs.
• LPCM tracks now come out byte-for-byte identical to the source disc. One flag in the first frame used to differ.
• An H.264 track could vanish entirely on the Mac and Linux builds. The Windows builds were never affected.
• Asking for a DTS core from a DTS Express track, or an AC3 core from a standalone TrueHD stream, now says there is nothing to extract rather than writing an empty file and reporting success.
• Tracks that cannot be muxed, such as a disc menu overlay, are named in the interface instead of appearing as a blank row.

If you are coming from 2.7.2, a great deal more has landed in between: the BDMV to ISO tab and its dual-layer handling, Dolby Vision track labelling, and two serious TrueHD fixes where raw .thd input was quietly dropping audio and the TrueHD plus AC3 merge was losing frames on longer films.

Which Build To Take, Windows 7 Included

Windows 7 works, and that is worth saying clearly because it was broken until recently.

Builds up to July 2026 shipped an interface toolkit that Windows 7 could not load, so the program failed to start with a missing DLL message. That was fixed in 2.10.0, and every release since is built and checked against Windows 7 SP1 - the 64-bit build as well as the 32-bit one.

On Windows 7, 10 or 11, take the 64-bit build unless you are on genuinely old hardware. Both are self-contained folders, so unzip and run.

On Mac there are two separate downloads and you need the right one: arm64 for Apple Silicon, x86_64 for Intel. More tools for these machines sit in the Mac software section.

On Linux the x64 build covers the command line on its own, but the GUI expects Qt 6 to already be installed on your system rather than bringing its own copy.

Stable Or Nightly, And Which To Take

Take the stable release. That advice used to come with more hesitation than it does now.

The project has been shipping stable versions every few days through 2026, so the gap a nightly build used to fill has largely closed. A nightly carries fixes that have not reached a release yet, and whatever was broken that day, with no testing in between.

Tools That Go With It

Before muxing, confirm what your sources actually are with MediaInfo, which reads out codec, bitrate and stream details.

After muxing, test the result in VLC Media Player, or install the K-Lite Codec Pack for system-wide playback support.

For MKV-specific work such as swapping subtitles, dropping audio tracks or reordering chapters, MKVToolNix is the better fit and sits alongside tsMuxeR rather than competing with it.

If the goal is to shrink a Blu-ray rather than remux it, BD Rebuilder handles the size reduction, and LosslessCut covers quick lossless trimming when you only need a clip.

And if the video genuinely has to be re-encoded first, VidCoder wraps the HandBrake engine in a friendlier interface with NVENC and Quick Sync acceleration.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If you want a smaller file, tsMuxeR cannot help you. Muxing does not reduce size in any meaningful way, and a two-hour 4K remux stays enormous.

The tell is simple: if your reason for opening the tool is "this file is too big", you want an encoder, not a muxer.

If you only need to cut a section out of a video, LosslessCut does that in a fraction of the clicks. And if you want a polished consumer application with wizards and presets, this is not that. tsMuxeR is a precise tool with a plain interface, and it assumes you know what a stream is.

Quick questions

Who Maintains It Now

tsMuxeR was originally written by Roman Vasilenko and later opened up through the justdan96/tsMuxer repository.

Development then moved to a fork by jaminmc, which modernised the codebase to C++20 with Qt6. Current releases now come from a further fork at teaching-droid/tsMuxer, which is where 2.15.0 and everything since 2.9.0 was built.

That is worth knowing if you go looking for the project yourself, because the original repository still turns up first in most searches and has not shipped a release in years.

More tools for this kind of work sit in the media backup section, and the video codecs section covers the formats involved.

Download tsMuxeR 2.15.0 and see how it handles your files, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.