[RoofusPennymore]

Anyone aware of a way to extract and convert Tivo video files using a Mac? I have a DirecTivo and have a network card on its way.

[iChristopher]

I haven't tried this yet, but I'm guessing it might work with Virtual PC. The tricky part is putting a NIC in your Tivo, but if you have installed a NIC in a Linux box or PC - you are half way there.

http://pvrhack.sonnik.com/tivo/extract-stream.htm

[CIA]

Which DirecTivo are you using? I have a Hughes DirecTivo box (GXCEBOT or something like that) that I'm about to put another HD in (shipped with a 40GB, want to add an 80 or a 120) Some issue with a swap file makes me think the 120 may not happen.
Anyway....
How did you put the ethernet card in the machine? I would love to bypass the daily calls and do all that over my LAN-Cablemodem. Does it work with DHCP based LANS? Where did you get the card, and was it hard to put it in? I've been trolling over at Tivocommunity.com , which is a great resource. Everything there is PC or Linux based, which adds to my confusion, as I'm a born and raised Mac only guy. (heaven help me if Apple ever goes under!)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[RoofusPennymore]

Originally posted by CIA:
Which DirecTivo are you using? I have a Hughes DirecTivo box (GXCEBOT or something like that) that I'm about to put another HD in (shipped with a 40GB, want to add an 80 or a 120) Some issue with a swap file makes me think the 120 may not happen.
Anyway....
How did you put the ethernet card in the machine? I would love to bypass the daily calls and do all that over my LAN-Cablemodem. Does it work with DHCP based LANS? Where did you get the card, and was it hard to put it in? I've been trolling over at Tivocommunity.com , which is a great resource. Everything there is PC or Linux based, which adds to my confusion, as I'm a born and raised Mac only guy. (heaven help me if Apple ever goes under!)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

The ethernet card connects via a "reverse" pci connector on the board. Then you need to install the software on the TIVO to enable it. There is also software that you can use to have the tivo to use the ethernet instead of the phone. You just need a serial port and a terminal emulator, no reason you cannot do that on a Mac.

There should be no reason that you cannot install a second hard drive, there is even a "blessing" program that works on the mac.

I have a Sony T60.

[v8q]

Originally posted by RoofusPennymore:


The ethernet card connects via a "reverse" pci connector on the board. Then you need to install the software on the TIVO to enable it. There is also software that you can use to have the tivo to use the ethernet instead of the phone. You just need a serial port and a terminal emulator, no reason you cannot do that on a Mac.

There should be no reason that you cannot install a second hard drive, there is even a "blessing" program that works on the mac.

I have a Sony T60.

I have used extractstream on my sony svr2000. You will probably want to get tivoweb too. It has an extractstream module. The rules are a little different for you (direct tivo) but if you spend some time you should figure out a way. On the SA units, the big problem is the 32Khz audio which needs to be resampled up to 44.1 Khz. I have not yet found a good (mac) way to do this.
Any ideas? (OSX or ppc linux)
For you, I think you may need to re-encode the mpeg files to a legal bit rate if you plan to make DVDs. That is a big PITA and a good place to lose video quality. You may actually be better off if you can capture the analog video on your mac and convert it with quicktime or idvd or something. There are lots of people doing tivo extraction, but 99.99 percent of them are on wintel - as are 99.9% of the working extraction tools. You can try http://dealdatabase.com/forum/
for pointers.

[T u r b o]

Screw VPC, OSX is perfect for this stuff!

(This all assumes you have a working network interface on your TiVo).

Setup an NFS export on your Mac. Install the nfs.o module on your TiVo, and mount your Mac drive directly on the TiVo!

I use a program called mfs_export on the tivo, which takes a stream and dumps to several "part" files on the Mac. There are other programs that do the same thing, though it's been a long time since I've looked at what was out there...

Then run a program like zss on the part files (zss.c compiles just fine under OSX) via "cat *.part | zss program" or something similar. This will give you a program.m2v and program.m2a.

I then run the program.m2a through mpg123 and further through sox, to convert the 32khz samples to 48khz (and filter it as well.

The resulting files are acceptable for importing into A.Pack and DVD studio pro, where you can simply put in your chapter breaks (I do it right after commercials) and burn right to DVD.

Of course, I have all of this scripted so it's really no more difficult than clicking on the program to dump through TiVoWEB, then running one script on my Mac to convert the files...

- Mike

[RoofusPennymore]

Originally posted by T u r b o:
Screw VPC, OSX is perfect for this stuff!

(This all assumes you have a working network interface on your TiVo).

Setup an NFS export on your Mac. Install the nfs.o module on your TiVo, and mount your Mac drive directly on the TiVo!

I use a program called mfs_export on the tivo, which takes a stream and dumps to several "part" files on the Mac. There are other programs that do the same thing, though it's been a long time since I've looked at what was out there...

Then run a program like zss on the part files (zss.c compiles just fine under OSX) via "cat *.part | zss program" or something similar. This will give you a program.m2v and program.m2a.

I then run the program.m2a through mpg123 and further through sox, to convert the 32khz samples to 48khz (and filter it as well.

The resulting files are acceptable for importing into A.Pack and DVD studio pro, where you can simply put in your chapter breaks (I do it right after commercials) and burn right to DVD.

Of course, I have all of this scripted so it's really no more difficult than clicking on the program to dump through TiVoWEB, then running one script on my Mac to convert the files...

- Mike

So how about some links to some of these programs (I assume they are all command line?).

Would you be willing to share your scripts?

[T u r b o]

Uh links? No, sorry, I got most of this stuff together about a year ago, and haven't updated it since (it if works, don't touch it!).

fink can get mpg123 and sox I believe, zss was just some 100-line single c file I compiled on my machine.

I'd be happy to share what I have but none of it's very... organized.

I had planned to put together a cocoa front end for everything (I bought THE cocoa book and all!) But I just haven't had time to get it going yet...

- Mike

[v8q]

Originally posted by T u r b o:
Screw VPC, OSX is perfect for this stuff!

(This all assumes you have a working network interface on your TiVo).

Setup an NFS export on your Mac. Install the nfs.o module on your TiVo, and mount your Mac drive directly on the TiVo!

I use a program called mfs_export on the tivo, which takes a stream and dumps to several "part" files on the Mac. There are other programs that do the same thing, though it's been a long time since I've looked at what was out there...

Then run a program like zss on the part files (zss.c compiles just fine under OSX) via "cat *.part | zss program" or something similar. This will give you a program.m2v and program.m2a.

I then run the program.m2a through mpg123 and further through sox, to convert the 32khz samples to 48khz (and filter it as well.

The resulting files are acceptable for importing into A.Pack and DVD studio pro, where you can simply put in your chapter breaks (I do it right after commercials) and burn right to DVD.

Of course, I have all of this scripted so it's really no more difficult than clicking on the program to dump through TiVoWEB, then running one script on my Mac to convert the files...

- Mike

Can you post the source code for zss?
I have not heard of that one. I have been using extractstream so far.
I also found that re-encoding the audio (I have a SA tivo) seems to work OK with:

madplay -owave:- program.m2a | mp2enc -V -o program.mpa

I then use the missingMpegTools package to mplex and build a SVCD file for toast. The audio conversion is kinda slow on my old mac, but the video comes off the tivo at what ever bitrate and resolution I want so I save a lot of time there.

I have not done many SVCDs yet but so far this has worked for me with decent results. My source video is always from a DV camera.

[T u r b o]

I got the zss source from
http://www.30below.com/~zmerch/tivo/zss-055.cpp

I did make some modifications but I believe it compiles just fine as-is.

With zss, mpg123, and sox all available I use this script to create my program.m2v and program.wav files for DVD. If you were going to make an xVCD, you could leave the audio alone probably. My DVD player will decode mpeg audio on VCDs and DVDs both, but I convert to WAV and then encode in AC3 so that it's playable on more standalone units.

This is the guts of the script:

cat $NFS_DIR/?.part | /users/turbo/src/misc/zss - $OUT_DIR/program
/sw/bin/mpg123 -s $OUT_DIR/program.m2a | sox -traw -r32000 -s -c2 -w - -twav -r48000 $OUT_DIR/program.wav mask

- Mike

[v8q]

Originally posted by T u r b o:
I got the zss source from
http://www.30below.com/~zmerch/tivo/zss-055.cpp

I did make some modifications but I believe it compiles just fine as-is.

With zss, mpg123, and sox all available I use this script to create my program.m2v and program.wav files for DVD. If you were going to make an xVCD, you could leave the audio alone probably. My DVD player will decode mpeg audio on VCDs and DVDs both, but I convert to WAV and then encode in AC3 so that it's playable on more standalone units.

This is the guts of the script:



- Mike

Thanks!!

[-Q-]

Thanks for all this info! Just got the Tivo series 2 and got it hooked up to my broadband network using a USB-to-ethernet adaptor and a Linksys wireless bridge. My next step was to noodle out how to get the video off...but now I don't have to!

Thanks again!

[RoofusPennymore]

I'm still working on this but here is what I have learned so far...

Keep in mind that I am wanting to edit out the comercials. Forget iMove, for now at least. If you dont want to edit the comercials you can skip most of this.

Use a PC and TyTool to get the files off the Tivo. There is a guy I've talked to that has done this with a Mac but its pretty complicated at this point.

Audio File: Change the .m2a to .mp2 on the audio file and open it in iTunes, iTunes will let you convert ot a .mp3. Turns out AT doesnt let you copy stuff from a .mp2 audio file.

You can convert the video file with 1 of several programs or open it directly in QT if you have the QT MP2 componet.

Open the MP3 file in QT, Copy all the audio and "Add Scaled" into QT. Make sure your audio and video are synced throughout the video. I've had problems with that and I think its due to TyTools export.

Then edit the comercials in QT.

Then save the video in whatever format and use MediaPipe to make the neccissary files for use on a SVCD or DVD. I'm still trying to learn MediaPipe so not sure how it goes.

[v8q]

You may want to look at ExtractStream instead of tytool.
As far as I can tell, it works equally as good/bad but at least you do not need a pc to use it.
If you really want to dig into this, you might try to use mfs_export - which was written by the one and only person who actually understands the tivo file system.
It runs on the tivo too - so no pc needed.
You would export the individual chunks (by fsid) and convert them individually then re-assemble later.
I think people get the best results this way but I have not tried it yet.