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

[TivoMerch]

Of the two guru replies I got, both came from this list, so I figgered 
there's no need to send it thru the Yahoo list, too, so...

At 17:21 10/30/2002 +1000, Warren wrote:

>Ok, I suppose I should 'fess up. I've been working on Playitsam version 2....

[snip]

>What do you think?
>
>Cheers,
>         Warren

Well, with a little begging, pleading, and a promise that I wouldn't 
publish the code as it's unfinished, Warren sent me the the source to 
V.2... and without letting the cat out of the bag, lemme just say this is 
*way* deeper than I'd have been able to create on my own [at least not for 
a *very* long time...]. My color laser printer happily churned out almost 
30 pages of notes, code & whatnot, and that's just to get started in what 
should be a very fun, but intense, learning exercise.

Warren - My hat's off to you! I don't plan on 'borrowing' any code - from 
first look, what I'm trying to do is quite a bit different than playitsam, 
but if I do need a small clip, I'll make sure you get credit! However, you 
have a few ideas that are somewhat similar to what I wanted to do in zss, 
so I'm sure there's a lot of concepts that I'll be able to glean from your 
code & learn from...

I've been programming for a long time, in languages as strange as APL & 
Lisp [most of my current expertise being in Perl] but I'm still a relative 
beginner in C, so I still have a lot of catch-up to do there. If there's 
anything I can do to help [I'm not bad at adding bells & whistles to things 
- I did make quite a few changes to splitstream folks liked, so if there's 
anything I can do to help, just holler! ;-)

and... At 10:47 10/30/2002 +0000, Faye wrote:

>Check out my thread on http://alt.org/forum/ (Towards getting a complete
>explanation of MFS TyStream chunk directory)
>
>http://alt.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=15&start=0&rid=&S=afed37df20b5dac275b61274319e4bf7

I did... and the good news, is it's excellent stuff! :-))  The only bad 
news is, the forum doesn't have a "printer-friendly" button, and a lot of 
the text & data gets "clipped" off the edge printing in portrait in both IE 
& Mozilla 1.0.1... :-(  I'll try "selecting" the text next, and/or 
landscape mode to see if I can get a decent copy onto paper... (despite 
being a tree-hugger, sometimes the only way to get big ideas into my widdow 
pea brain is by putting it on thin, flat, white bark... ;-)

If that doesn't work, I'll figure out how to get that rascal into 
dreamweaver - it can reformat darned near everything! ;-)

>I did a lot of research, but haven't had much time to complete my own
>program.

And wow, did you! Excellent job!

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

And now, a few notes & whatnot that I'd figured out on my own:

I like logging. *Lots* of logging. Logs get big, pkzip makes 'em small 
again! ;^>  In my initial rework of zss (ver. 0.60 at this point...) just 
the tivo header info on 4480 chunks created over 41Megs of logs, to help 
try to figure things out for a good, accurate split, and this is what I found:

[[ people smarter than me might know this, but hey... gotta put something 
in the archives! ;-) ]]

 From what I can see, the PES data in the Tivo Chunk headers means very 
little to the actual MPEG stream itself - I think it's for internal Tivo 
housekeeping...

Also, it looks like the chunk boundaries mean very little to the actual 
audio / video boundaries so care needs to be taken to make sure that 
streams aren't mangled in mid-chunk...

I've already learned a lot more in the last few days on how the tivo 
headers look & work, so I'll be updating my tivo header page shortly... 
remember, if anyone has any info that would help complete the info on 
there, feel free to email it my way! ;-)

Many Thanks, all!  I'm running a little late for Law & Order... but... I 
have a Tivo! ;-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger