[Request] TiVo Plugin or Script?

[Mr2001]

Not sure if this is the right forum anymore, but here's an update...

I have basic functionality working as a C# app which speaks XBMSP to XBMC and HTTP(S) to TiVo. I can browse the recordings through my Xbox and play the video, with my PC decrypting on the fly.

I'm a little disappointed in XBMC's XBMSP support at this point; from the spec, it looks like you can have unique pathnames that are separate from the descriptive titles, but XBMC doesn't support that, so names have to be both unique and descriptive without breaking the filename parser. What I'm doing now is stripping illegal punctuation from the show title and then appending a unique TiVo recording ID.

Also, I had a hell of a time tracking down several problems that all turned out to be the fault of Windows treating stdin/stdout as text files (which I had to patch tivodecode to fix), and I still have no idea how I'm going to make fast forwarding work. But I can watch Heroes in bed now!

[Rakeesh]

Any update on this? I'd really like to see this come into fruition.

I still have no idea how I'm going to make fast forwarding work. But I can watch Heroes in bed now!

I'm not sure if this would be possible to do as I don't think the embedded web server supports HTTP resume. That would make random access impossible unless you pooled the data somewhere as it was downloaded. This wouldn't allow fast forwarding past any parts you haven't downloaded, however you could seek around in areas of the video that you have already downloaded. But doing all of this would invariably complicate things more.

[Mr2001]

Ah, almost forgot about this. I no longer use my TiVo, so development has sort of stalled. But it stalled at a very usable point.

Here's a link to my program XBTivens. Unzip to a folder, edit the config file, and run XBTivens.Console.exe.

The parts of the config file you need to edit are highlighted here:

            <setting name="TivoURI" serializeAs="String">
                <value>https://192.168.1.123/nowplaying/index.html</value>
            </setting>
            <setting name="ListenPort" serializeAs="String">
                <value>1400</value>
            </setting>
            <setting name="ListingCacheTime" serializeAs="String">
                <value>300</value>
            </setting>
            <setting name="TivoDecodePath" serializeAs="String">
                <value>C:\path\to\tivodecode.exe</value>
            </setting>
            <setting name="TivoMAK" serializeAs="String">
                <value>0000000000</value>
            </setting>

Put your TiVo's IP address in TivoURI, your Media Access Key in TivoMAK (both of these can be found in the TiVo settings menu), and the correct path to tivodecode.exe in TivoDecodePath. You may also wish to edit ListenPort to change the port it listens on, or ListingCacheTime to set the time in seconds that it will cache the TiVo listings.

This might work on Linux or OS X if you have Mono installed. I don't think you'll need my patched copy of tivodecode on non-Windows systems, so just use a native version of that.

Let me know if you have trouble.. like I said, it's been a while since I used this, so I may have forgotten something.

[Rakeesh]

Woot, thanks, I'll try this out.

Too bad it's discontinued though There have been many ways of streaming files off of a tivo to xbmc throughout the years, but since they never get updated new versions of xbmc break compatibility with them.

I think the most easy option that ever existed was the ccxstream binary that somebody compiled a while back, but it doesn't appear to work anymore for me. It gets a showing list but xbmc just shows a blank menu when it finishes loading it. Sadly I don't know the first thing about C otherwise I'd try to update it myself.

I think it might be that the .ty extension was removed from XBMC's supported formats list, but its been so long since I've used XBMC that I forgot how to modify this (searching all of the existing xml files doesn't reveal anything.)

There's also the option of running mfs_ftp on the tivo but doing so opens a huge can of worms.

[braddwalker]

Mr2001, I've been working on a somewhat similar project, and was definitely stymied by the tivodecode stdin/stdout problems you mentioned. Any chance you'd be willing to share the patch source code and some samples of how you invoked it to facilitate the stream redirection?

[pashdown]

I managed to get streaming working from a hacked DirecTivo to an XBox running an earlier version of XBMC. The details are in this thread on Dealdatabase, specifically this post.

I already had AlphaWolf's "All-In-One S2 utils" installed on my DirecTivo, so I just ran ccxstream and then added the source in on the Xbox XBMC. It had problems buffering, but it did eventually play the source.

Unfortunately, the use of Mplayer was tossed by XBMC and it now uses DVDPlayer for its built-in. DVDPlayer doesn't understand the "ty" container that the Tivo writes, where Mplayer does. This is why it works on the old version of XBMC but not the new. I tried writing a playercorefactory.xml entry to handle the .ty extension:

<playercorefactory>
<players>
<player name="MPlayer" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>/usr/bin/mplayer</filename>
<args>-really-quiet -fs -ontop -vo vpdau:deint=4 -vsync </args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>true</hideconsole>
<hidecursor>true</hidecursor>
<forceontop>true</forceontop>
</player>
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
<rule filetypes="ty" filename="*.ty" player="MPlayer"/>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>

However, all this does is pass an URI to Mplayer that it doesn't understand.

xbmc.old.log:21:36:17 T:140537571047696 M:3316793344  NOTICE: ExecuteAppLinux: "/usr/bin/mplayer" -really-quiet -fs -ontop -vo vpdau:deint=4 -vsync  "xbms://166.70.201.155:1400/NowShowing/ 11_Metalocalypse _ Black Fire Upon Us_7053822 .ty"

If there could be an intermediary handler to deal with the xbms protocol and pipe it into Mplayer this just might work. I'd really like to get rid of the Tivo I use solely for MRV to the main Tivo.