pyTivo Discussion Forum

[Texas Kelly]

Did a search on the boards and couldn't find info on this posted anywhere, so apologies in advance if this has been answered before:

Got pyTivo installed and running as a service on my WHS2011 server and now trying to load my content. I have a series of short MP4 files (about 3-7 minutes in length each) that are taking a ridiculously long amount of time to pull from my server to my TiVo box (example: 31 minutes at 1.92 Mb/s for a 3 1/2 minute video) so I figured the easiest thing to do was to convert all of the MP4s to MPGs so the TiVo box could pull them without needing to transcode. Of course, that's turned out to be harder than expected, because the programs I'm most familiar with for this task (Avidemux and Handbrake) either are blowing up in my face when I try settings that I think are right (former) or just can't do it (latter).

Would greatly appreciate some tips and/or guides for doing this conversion in a quick and stress-free way...

[wmcbrine]

That isn't normal, unless it's an extremely underpowered processor. Since it's a Windows machine, I'm assuming that's not the case. You should be able to get something like real-time transfers.

You don't say what kind of TiVo is involved. Assuming it's a Series 3 or later, you should try using the web interface to "push" the videos, which will likely be able to transfer them without having to reencode them.

Other than that... you could try turning on debug in pyTivo.conf, watching what pyTivo does when it calls ffmpeg, and copying that. Or you could even just use pyTivo normally, then transfer the reencoded video from the TiVo back to the computer.

[Texas Kelly]

[lucasnz]

You need to stop the service.

[Texas Kelly]

OK, I stopped the service and reloaded pyTivo in the console. The first thing I noticed was that the path for ffmpeg had reset itself back to its Linux default even though I had set it correctly previously via the web interface. I ended up having to edit pyTivo.conf manually to get the ffmpeg path correct, then tested it with a 2 1/2 minute file thinking that might have been the problem... and it of course was not, as the transcode took about 25 minutes to complete. I've quoted the output from the pyTivo console below. (I didn't turn debug on, let me know if I should do that and try again - I do see some useful information in the log, but I have no clue what any of it means.)

[Texas Kelly]

Any suggestions as to what to do? Should I resubmit this in the Support forum since it's branched off quite a bit from what I originally intended?

[wmcbrine]

I don't think you're going to get a different readership there, seeing as this whole forum only gets a few posts a day. Anyway, no, please don't.

[wmcbrine]

BTW, what does your CPU meter look like when one of these slow transfers is going on?

[Texas Kelly]

New output on transfer of same file with debug turned on. (I don't think I was able to capture all the output; hopefully this is enough to be useful.)

[philhu]

is it a dual processor system?

50% means most likely that one processor is at 100%, pegged

[Texas Kelly]

[wmcbrine]

[wmcbrine]

I should add -- to return to the original topic, if you want to try pre-converting the file, there in the log is your command line to do it the way pyTivo does it:

C:\pyTivo\bin\ffmpeg.exe -i E:\ServerFolders\Recorded TV\Food Network\The Best Thing I Ever Ate - Umberto's Pizzeria - New Hyde Park, NY.mp4 -vcodec mpeg2video -b 16384k -maxrate 30000k -bufsize 4096k -aspect 16:9 -s 1920x1080 -ab 448k -ar 48000 -acodec ac3 -copyts -f vob -

Replace the final "-" with a destination filename, and put quotes around the source pathname.

[mcampbell]

[wmcbrine]

The name is mostly irrelevant. There's a long list of recognized extensions, but what happens once pyTivo decides a file is a video file depends on the report from ffmpeg. There's also a shorter list of extensions that are recognized as files that can be passed through if pyTivo can't find ffmpeg. ".vob" is on both lists. So is ".mpg", which is what I'd use. But it really makes no difference.