Global Reset

I’ve finally hit a pretty big roadblock in my switch over to the Mac. I am having trouble getting a good set of tools to help me offload video from my TiVo. I’ve been back and forth on this since I bought the TiVo, where I’d go from constantly downloading video for archiving to not really thinking about it at all. Since I picked up the PSP, one of my goals has been to get a nice workflow going to grab episodes of shows that Nicole won’t watch with me (X-Play, Smallville, and Deep Space 9) and take them along with me. Unfortunately, Dell has been delaying my order for a 1GB memory stick pro duo, so using the PSP as my mobile video player is still bottlenecked by the storage problem. I’d like to cancel my order from Dell and just grab it from Amazon (1 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo) for a few dollars more, but why bother if I can’t get the tools in place to make it convenient on the Mac? This makes me a very sad man…

Here’s what I’ve tried so far…

TiVo-mplayer Had pretty good success with this on the PC, though I had a lot of audio-sync problems. Given that it’s at 1 version number greater than what I last tried on the PC, they may have fixed it (though I’m not too hopeful). In any case, I always had to correct an error in one of the .c files (variable declared in the middle of a function, rather than at the top of a scope) just to get it to compile on Windows. On the Mac, I gave up after correctly nearly a dozen compile errors. If anyone would like to provide a binary of this for Mac OSX 10.4.1, I’d sure like to give it a shot.

MPlayer / MPlayerOSX / ffmpegX Unfortunately, none of these incorporated the above changes to support TiVo’s .ty files. So, they are mostly useless for my purposes. However, if I could get my hands on a TiVo-mplayer binary, ffmpegX would still function as a front-end for that command-line tool. (Update 6/9/2005) I discovered that the mencoder portion of the ffmegX binaries does include the demux code for ty files. I also discovered that, just like the last time I used mencoder on the PC to transcode, I still get major audio sync problems. I assume if I just demux the video and use another tool to remux it (with some manual adjustments to audio sync) it will work fine… But that’s too much work. I’m spoiled by the easy TyTool for Windows. Unfortunately for me, he won’t share the source for it so we can try to port it to OSX.

TyStudio These guys have built, what looks like, a fantastic tool. Unfortunately, it has never worked for me. They have an OSX version (requires X11 be installed) and it seems to function nicely once you get ”dlcompat” installed. I couldn’t get Fink or DarwinPorts to install dlcompat for me, so I ended up just checking it out of CVS and building from source. Seems the easiest way to get the libs in the right folder so that TyStudio can see them anyways. Once I got this tool running, I selected a local “.ty” file I had sitting around. Amazingly, this tool performs on Mac OSX exactly as it performed on the PC… That is to say, it got exactly halfway through indexing the .ty file before crashing heinously. I believe it might be because my .ty files came from a series 2 TiVo, because their website only has info about a series 1 server component.

From here, I’m kind of at a loss. I guess my options are: 1) forget about getting video on the PSP memory stick and just buy UMD movies to keep myself entertained, 2) use the PC for video extraction/editing since I already have a good toolset to use, 3) “get cracking” on porting the other PC tools over to the Mac.

Aside: Whenever I have to code up my own solution instead of waiting on someone else to provide me with one, I love using the phrase “get cracking.” It comes from an email conversation a buddy of mine had at Ga Tech. He was using a system tray CD-player app, but he felt it was missing a feature or two. He emailed the author of the app to let him know what was missing, and the author gave him the succint reply: “Get cracking!” :)

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