TivoApp v2

garyw90_home garyw90 at e...
Wed, 06 Feb 2002 05:25:52 -0000


For those of you on this forum using TivoApp, I'm glad that so many 
seem to be using this application. It's when I find so many people 
using it that I want to add more functionality, and I hope it is 
meeting your needs. 

I've finally at the point where I'm ready to have my new version of 
TivoApp (http://home.earthlink.net/~garyw90/TivoApp.zip)
available. I've integrated TyConvert into the application, 
since so many people seem to have pretty good luck with creating 
MPEG files using this. The full web page describing this is at 
http://home.earthlink.net/~garyw90/TivoApp.html. 

As for myself, I seem to have had some difficulties making the audio 
sync properly with either this new version of TivoApp or the 
standalone TyConvert. 

The new version of this application has many new options for the 
conversion process, and the page at TivoApp home page (and the 
included TivoApp.html web page) describe these new options. If you 
are familiar with TyConvert, then you are already familiar with the 
options. I chose not to expose the options to skip some part of the 
beginning part of a show, and if there are complaints, I'll put it 
in. 

I've also enhanced the TyConvert code a little. First, I added code 
to check the sequence numbers from the chunk headers. Most of the 
other conversion programs do this, and I found that this takes care 
of some sequencing problems that made TyConvert think the timecodes 
wereallwrong. Also, I added code to look for the 03 packets in the 
chunk headers, because these cause a problem for some. I have not 
found any tystreams with this 03 packet, so I can't verify that this 
code works. 

Also as part of revamping the code to use TyConvert, it is possible 
that some of the network hang issues may be taken care of. The older 
code used a ring buffer to pass data from the network to the 
conversion code, whereas this new code uses an OS pipe, which should 
be much more reliable. 

As a part of adding TyConvert, I've made a major revamping of how 
the status is reported, and it now has much better window for 
showing this status along with a progress bar. This works for all 
extractions, including the raw tystream mode. 

As before, I am including the source code for those adventurous 
people. The older version is still available as TivoApp V1 

If you have problems with this new version, I'll be happy to do what 
I can to fix them, but I still don't have a good MPEG reference that 
might help fix the audio sync problems. If anyone can point me to a 
good book, or has the complete spec, I'd like to learn it. 

And any feedback is welcome as well. You will already see some new 
features that resulted from feedback from version 1. Enjoy!