TivoWebPlus 2.1 changes

As you may know, I still have a HR10-250 in service.  I run TivoWebPlus 2.1 on the box. It mostly works the way I want it, although at times it is a bit slow.

I checked out the latest version from the sourceforge web site many months ago and found there's some issues with it that I'd like to fix.

I'e made the following fixes:

1. Sadly, I didn't document very well where I got this fix from. It makes Movies show up as Movies and not as 'Not an Episode' in the ToDo and Now Playing fields. This appears to be a combination of my hacking, but mostly the work of "DJL". I think I downloaded it from a dealdatabase or other tivo forum posting, but I can't find it now.
2. Fixed the long series number problem so episode numbers are properly displayed.
3. Added a Thumb link so you can put those in your ToDo lists. I find this handy for quickly killing those things that Tivo thinks I might like, but I don't.
4. Fixed a problem with descriptions being nothing but spaces (this may have also been a forum find, but I can't find docs for that either)
5. Fixed a few problems with todofeed.tcl (not sure these are completely good, as I think I was trying to parse the output for something I did differently).
6. Fixed a spelling error.

OK, these changes won't change the world, but since all work has stopped on TivoWebPlus, I thought I'd share them with the world.  You can find my cumulative patches here. If anybody recognizes #1 or #4 or can locate their origin, please let me know by commenting

I've also hacked together a todo database publishing api. It is crude, but it allows me to cancel shows I've already downloaded via ftp and such.  On the off chance people find it useful, you can find it here.

If you find these things useful, please comment. Not sure how many people may be interested, or if the TiVo hacking world has totally moved beyond this device...

Some notes on HR10-250 video

Over the past 5 or 6 years, I've had my TiVo HR10-250 setup to extract videos off of it.  Please see my other posts on how I set that up with Zipper and mfs_ftp.  There are some newer programs to help with the video extraction, but I have a cobbled together system that works OK enough for now, so I'll not go into those here.  Today I'll explore how to convert the files mfs_ftp can produce into something that looks good, at least on the TV I have :). I'm in the US, so all these instructions are NTSC-centric. Sorry for all my pals out there that have PAL.

What I will talk about is converting the tmf files (or the .ty files) into something useful. For me, useful varies with time. The tmf files are like ty files, except they are big tar balls of a series of .ty files (all smaller than some limit that I can't recall) and a xml file that describes the show. The tytompeg program is what I use to convert them to a mpg file. You can find info on how to snag this here DVRpedia entry on TyToMpg.

The tytompg program produces video that is 480x480 with a 4:3 pixel aspect ratio.  This turns out to be the SVCD resolution, so many tricks for turning SVCDs into DVDs work when processing these files. However, they aren't fully compliant SVCD files. There's some audio delay issues that cause problems and many tools have difficulties with these files. I've only overcome the synchronization problems by trial and error at this point (certain ffmpeg operations causes something to remove the stutter, sometimes on some versions). One problem with tytompg is that I lose the subtitles. I'll explore that problem more later...

A number of cartoons are broadcast these days on the SD stations in letterbox. My son watches them. It would sure by nice if I could process these files to produce a nice, 16x9 videos that play nicely. Since these files are 480x480, the actual video is in the pixels from 8,60 to 472,360 (the extra 8 pixels is a band that many stations seem to put around the picture for reasons unknown). Sometimes there's only a few pixels on each side, so it isn't worth the hassle to get rid of them (in which case the picture is bounded by 0,60 to 480x360). 720x480 is the only DVD resolution that supports a 16:9 aspect ratio. Speaking of aspect ratios, please see the writeup at http://howto-pages.org/ffmpeg/ which covers this in extreme detail. Here's the ffmpeg 1.0.1 command line I use to convert them (the 0.x command needs to crop based on the 720x480 image size).

ffmpeg -i 002-ty.mpg -vf yadif,crop=464:360:8:60,scale=720:480 -aspect 16:9 -vcodec mpeg2video -s 720x480 -b 4500k 002-nice.mpg

mpeg2video is easy to create and fairly ubiquitous, but has a couple of draw backs.  First, it is large. The above command typically doubles the size of the file. It looks really nice on the big screen HD TV (so ffmpeg's upscaler is a little better than the upscaling in the TV), but eats up the storage space. Second, many of the media renders I have in the house do mpeg2 rendering in software, so the playback can be a bit jerky on those devices.

Converting to h.264 is an option that I'll explore in later columns. The current level of tool integration isn't so nice, so would be a much longer write up.