A Tivo extraction X-File

[John Douglass]

Or, an example of why one tool alone is not a good thing.

Last weekend FOX was showing an X-Files marathon. My chance to get
the classic baseball episode writen by Duchovny! That's the last
normal thing that happened.

First, it was not until a couple of days later I sufficiently-
carefully read Josh's instructions to get "tytool" working, so I was
using Gary's TivoApp. "Connect", see the message about "ShowList.tcl
192.168.1.1 7100", but instead of a list of programs on my Tivo, I get
an error message, something about expecting a "semi colon" in the list
of shows. Ok...

Can't seem to get John Sproull's mfsstream web module to work - It'll
list shows, but downloads result in zero-length files. At least it
finishes corresponding fast! Ok, so I do things the old-fashioned
way, following Roger's instructions from
http://www.30below.com/~zmerch/tivo/, getting the fsids from TivoWeb.
Then it gets weird.

We've all seen the string of fsids that define where a Now Showing
show is stored. They start somewhere, say 576930, and extend in
sequence through 576931, 576932, etc. Not this one, though:

546865 546883 546895 546898 546900 546911

(Recorded at Best quality on a Sony SVR2000 stand-alone with a 40G 
A-drive and a Maxtor 160G B-drive - Yeah, I know only 127G is
useable.) Anyway, used netcat in a bash session on Tivo and a DOS
window on my WinME pc to get them. Netcat dies beginning the download
of 546900. Weird. I netcat it and 546911, then, in an rxvt window
running bash I cat them all together. ("rxvt" is an xterm-like cygwin
window that has all the functionality of an xterm EXCEPT you can't use
netcat or ftp. Pity, too.)

Josh's vsplit12 splits it, but only up to the last 20% of the show.
No errors, it just quits as if it had reached the end. Bummer.
Vsplitting 546900 by itself results in a good .m2v file, but a zero-
byte .m2a file, and a whole bunch of, "Error. We did not find an 
embedded audio header!" (Josh, you want to take a look at it?
http://tivo.30below.com/jdouglass/546900.ty)
 
Thanks to Roger's zss, which manages to split the tystream just fine,
I eventually got the whole show. BUT, TMPGEnc thinks that the last
bit that was zss'ed is incompatible with the rest!

The moral of the story? Good thing several people are sharing several
different tools, as no single tool for each step always works. I hope
that Gary doesn't abandon TivoApp now that Josh has released tytool
and John his mfswebmodule95. Similarly, I look forward to Josh's all-
in-one extract-split-muxer, but I'll treasure Roger's instuctions and
zss.

John
ps. tytool is my new extraction tool of choice, in part because it
alone lets me extract half a show at a time - A necessity when the
show is a 5-hour long Olympics program, and my hard-drive won't store
the whole thing as one file. And Josh - DO NOT change how tserver_mfs
works. I love closing the bash-prompt on the tivo and having the
tserver_mfs process, and the port it ties-up, go away! And please,
get th muxer working next. Thanks.
--
To err is human, to really foul things up requires root privileges.