pyTivo Discussion Forum

grumblebunny · Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Posts: 4 Location: Somewhere

I would like to say in my first post that pyTivo is fantastic. It works very, very well and I am grateful for the hard work that has gone into developing, maintaining, documenting and supporting it. I find pyTivo faster, more flexible, and stable than the TiVo Desktop solution. And I've had fun poking around with all the features.

I have a brief question about which ffmpeg to use. I apologize if this is covered somewhere. I could not find it. The Windows install instructions say:

"5. Grab the latest Rdian06 build of FFmpeg for pyTivo"

This certainly works out of the box. I am wondering, though, if there is any reason why I would not want to use another build from somewhere else.

As an experiment, I'm trying the April 9, 2012 Windows static build from Zeranoe (linked from the ffmpeg page) and it seems to be working very well in my setup with video and music. But "Step 5" is causing me to second guess myself.

Thanks for any replies and warmest regards.

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 2008 Location: Maryland

I think he had a patch to reduce the incidence of "non-monotone timestamp" errors. I'm not sure what else.

(I have no opinion on what build you should use, myself.)

lpwcomp · Joined: 09 Sep 2011 Posts: 70

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 2008 Location: Maryland

lpwcomp · Joined: 09 Sep 2011 Posts: 70

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 2008 Location: Maryland

No, that's pyTivo, it doesn't support TS format .tivo files yet.* I'll fix that soon.

* Well, I should say, my fork doesn't. Lucas has some support for it, not sure if that works with U.S. TiVos or not.

lpwcomp · Joined: 09 Sep 2011 Posts: 70

Iluvatar · Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 335

The captions issue is a Premiere problem. TS or PS files.

The lucasnz and my fork (the patch from lucasnz originally) have support for TTG transferring of TS .tivo files. Luke has a second branch off his main fork called mpeg-ts which I believe was meant to transfer .ts files natively to the TiVo (keep in mind he has a NZ TiVo). It was very broken the last time I tested it. Last update was 14 months ago.

Iluvatar · Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 335

grumblebunny · Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Posts: 4 Location: Somewhere

lucasnz · Joined: 13 Sep 2010 Posts: 251

@wmcbrine On the ffmpeg and .tivo files. I found I had to pass them through tivodecode in order for ffmpeg to accurately identify the file (it works on some files, mpeg-ts seems to be worse than ps) ... I think that's what it does in my mpeg-ts fork.

And yes, my mpeg-ts fork doesn't really work. It sort of worked on NZ tivos. TV is only transmitted in mpeg-ts down under, so they've obviously tweaked the software a bit to allow that to work. Tivo desktop can transfer mpeg-ts .tivo files in both directions on a NZ tivo.

My main fork really only has support for downloading mpeg-ts. It's a little behind wmcbrine and Iluvatar's forks. I'm about half way through integrating the recent changes.

Luke

grumblebunny · Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Posts: 4 Location: Somewhere

Hmmm.... I was never able to get ffmpeg to build but it looks like the current w32 static build at http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ is working and giving slightly higher transcode performance -- at least on my setup. I am using a HD TiVo so I may not see the "non-monotone timestamp" issues.