[Extractstream [MM]] Calling all Gurus!!! Tivo Technical questions...

[TivoMerch]

[[ Sorry for the x-post, but I did want this to reach as many Gurus as 
possible...]]

The long awaited day has arrived! I have *finally* started work again on 
zss!!! I pared 15 pages of zss version 0.55 source, down to 5 pages of 
mostly /*comments*/, #declares, and *minor* code that I didn't want to 
reinvent (filehandling, etc.) and whacked, basically, the meat & potatoes 
(all the splitting code, which wasn't compatible with UK streams, all the 
audio-offset code, which didn't always work... etc...) and I'm starting, 
basically, from scratch.

I have *already* learned a bit more about the Tivo's header records... and 
my program will have the ability of logging all of this if you wish... and 
I have some questions as to what I actually need to pay attention to, and 
other things I *think* might be odd (as I've never actually looked at this 
stuff - I only made logging / usability adjustments to Joe's code before) 
but I'm not sure, so I could use a little advice:

1) Am I Nutz???  [[ well, I already have the answer: Hell Yes!!! ;-) ]]

2) PES Header data - I've got it (but I don't have it decoded correctly 
from hex, yet... minor bug...) and I've looked at it, and it confuses me... 
Do I even need to pay any attention to it???

3) Many "tivo" records have the same PES records but different data sizes 
-- at first I thought I b0rked something, so at the end of each chunk, I 
told the proggie to add up all the audio & video record sizes, throw in the 
Tivo Header size, and spit out a total -- most of the time, it was 0x20000 
- so to me, it says that I'm not totally screwed up; but on occasion it was 
from 0x1FFE8 to 0x1FFFC, on multiples of 4 bytes. I would think that this 
would be too small if it were actually ClosedCaption data, [[ which types 
0x01 & 0x02 are "supposed" to be, but quite often, they had a size that was 
knackered up, and the rest of the record either seemed to have a normal 
PES, or was 0's...

-- I guess my question is this - Are Tivo records linear to the actual 
audio/video records in the MPEG stream, or do I not care about actual 
sizes, other than my program playing "traffic cop" - all C0 & D0 packets 
going to the .m2a, and all the E0 & F0 packets going to the .m2v, and 
bitbucket the rest???

Well, instead of asking a perjillion questions, I'll close it with:

"And any other Tivo header info you might have on hand -- I'd love! (For me 
& my proggie, but also for my Tivo header page, so others can benefit, too!!!
;-)

Anywho, Thanks tons, and laterz! :-)
Roger "Merch" Merchberger