Mencoder -ss & -endpos not working?

[oddball]

Whenever I try to use the -ss and -endpos options in Mencoder I get 'Cannot seek backward in a linear streams!'. I assume this is because it's a .TS file. Any way around this?

[giandrea]

Whenever I try to use the -ss and -endpos options in Mencoder I get 'Cannot seek backward in a linear streams!'. I assume this is because it's a .TS file. Any way around this?

Try to remux it to mpeg PS first. Try this command:
mencoder /path/to/input/file.ts -o /path/to/output/file.mpg -oac copy -ovc copy -of mpeg -noskip

If your TS file has more than one audio track, select it with -aid X, where X is the id of your audio track.

[oddball]

Thanks will give that a go.

EDIT: Hmm. Does not seem to work. The TS is BBC HD H.264 video. I can use '-alang eng' to get the audio output fine. But the video won't remux to anything playable.

[giandrea]

Thanks will give that a go.

EDIT: Hmm. Does not seem to work. The TS is BBC HD H.264 video. I can use '-alang eng' to get the audio output fine. But the video won't remux to anything playable.

So you can't mux it to MP4 because the audio is AC3. The only container supporting both H264 and AC3 that comes to my mind is Matroska.
Try to demux the audio and video from your TS, then mux it to matroska with mkvmerge, then feed the file to mplayer/mencoder.