Cleaning Up

[Josh Harding]

--- In ExtractStream@y..., neil_1_brown@y... wrote:

> Is it possible to modify this code to search out and nullify all 
> mpeg2 data on my TiVo for the purposes of backing it up onto 
> something other than half a spindle of CDRs? Maybe recording as
> much as I can at highest quality and then instead of extracting the 
> stream, writing it full of nulls that can be easily compressed
> during a backup ... or are there other considerations I'm not aware
> of?

I remember reading that it wasn't (yet) possible to restore a
tyStream 
that you'd pulled from the TiVo. I think that what you're asking
will 
happen after a stream can be restored.

I predict that the first step will be to take a tyStream (rather than 
two a/v streams), copy off the TiVo, record other stuff to fill the 
drive and over write that space, then copy the tyStream back. After 
that, things can progress toward how to take some other video stream 
and re-encode it to the exact format the TiVo wants. When that 
happens, we'll prolly find out if it's possible to just write all 0's 
rather than a valid MPEG stream.

I think the hard part will be that the TiVo is prolly very picky
about 
it's MPEG streams. Since a normal MPEG player is designed to allow 
you to play MPEGS from many sources, they try to be flexible. But
the 
TiVo only has to worry about playing back streams that it wrote. 
Since it wasn't intended to be able to access other data sources, it 
would seem unlikely that the developers put any unnecessary effort 
into coding it to play other streams. Not to sound discouraging... I 
think it'll happen, just won't be a trivial task.