# When the Mind fails...



## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

No I'm not talking about senility, and no matter how many people here at TCF think it applies to me, I'm talking about the TiVo Mind server.

Has anyone given any thought to a work-around whenever the TiVo Mind servers are down? They do occasionally go offline, and when they do, those of us who rely on the pyTivo "push" function are rather stuck. The same is true if one's local internet connection is down. There also may come a day when TiVo, for whatever reasons, shuts down the Mind servers.

Do we know enough to be able to implement a local Mind server, at least for the purposes of providing pyTivo push and similar capabilities? I realize this is not exactly trivial. One has to implement a local DNS server on the LAN and point the TiVos to it. On the server, one must implement a routine that constantly checks for the Mind server to be active on the internet, and re-points the DNS response when they are down. Finally, on the server one must implement a clone of the Mind server functions.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

AFAIK, everything we know about the mind server was learned by sniffing traffic between it and TiVo Desktop. (Well, that, and reading some strings from tivoapp, and guessing.) We don't have any of the traffic between the mind server and the TiVo box. It would be nice to have that.


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

Yeah, I rather thought that would be the case. I just really don't want to get stuck with company ready to watch TV when the Mind servers go down. Pushing h.264 in MP4 is absolutely wonderful, but transcoding MPEG4 to MPEG2 will no doubt take forever. My servers were prety decent racehorses in their day, and they can still pump out a lot more than the Gigabit LAN can gulp, but now they are plowhorses, and recoding from MPEG2 to MPEG4 takes ages, even with a 6 core CPU and a ton of memory. I haven't actrually tried it, but I have to believe recoding the other direction won't be much faster.


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