# Extending live buffer...



## TDaxGav (Jun 5, 2003)

I've been looking round a bit to see if I can find anything but it appears to be little light because we are using series 1 boxes, but is there anyway to extend the buffertime from the usual 30 minutes?

Thanks

Gav


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## Fred Smith (Oct 5, 2002)

Several ways, including Bufferhack as part of the Hackman module in TiVoweb.


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## jonphil (Aug 7, 2002)

Yes you need to download Bufferhack. Copy to to your Var directory and run it telling how much buffer you want. I now have 1hr buffer with no problems noticed so far.
Don't forget you will lose that from your recording space


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## TDaxGav (Jun 5, 2003)

Thanks VERY much guys... just loading it up now..


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Been running a 3 hour buffer with Bufferhack for a couple of months now without issue.

Often the Tivo has changed channel to something else in this time (clearing the buffe) but if by chance I manually watch something live then decide I want to record it all its a very handy feature to be able to go back for up to this length of time.


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## djb2002 (May 1, 2006)

Can anyone think of a good reason NOT to do this ?? - apart from if you are short of space ?

Thanks
Daniel


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

djb2002 said:


> Can anyone think of a good reason NOT to do this ?? - apart from if you are short of space ?
> l


The Buffer is recorded at Best so any extra space you allocate to the Live Buffer comes off the total Best recording time available to the machine. If you have only 40Gb so 11 hours at Best this would probably be unacceptable but if you have 250Gb or 400Gb etc then no real reason not to make the change.

The utility that makes this change is not a hack that runs in memory but is a one off program that permanently alters setttings in the machine that run at startup and allocates the size of the Live Buffer. There is no reason the buffer was originally only half an hour other than the original hard drive capacity of 40Gb which only provided 11 hours at Best so giving 30 minutes to the Live Buffer was quite a lot.

The current version of Bufferhack available at http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com/usefultivoapplications seems to be totally reliable.


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## Raisltin Majere (Mar 13, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> The Buffer is recorded at Best so any extra space you allocate to the Live Buffer comes off the total Best recording time available to the machine.


Can't the buffer quality be changed in a similar way to mode 0?



Pete77 said:


> allocates the size of the Love Buffer.


<child>giggle</child>


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Raisltin Majere said:


> Can't the buffer quality be changed in a similar way to mode 0?


Bufferhack merely changes the length of time recorded in the buffer.

There is a setting for Live Record Quality in Resources Editor in TivoWeb. I imagine this might alter the recording quality of all the material recorded under the Live Buffer.

Extending the length of the Live Buffer is a different decision and process from altering its recording quality


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## ericd121 (Dec 12, 2002)

I'm trying to install and run Bufferhack, but my Tivo is having none of it.

Have a look at this from the command line

```
Tivo2 /var/hack #ls -l bu*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 0        0            9944 Apr  3 11:49 bufferhack32a.tcl
Tivo2 /var/hack #./bufferhack32a.tcl 60 s
bash: ./bufferhack32a.tcl: No such file or directory
Tivo2 /var/hack #/var/hack/bufferhack32a.tcl 60 s
bash: /var/hack/bufferhack32a.tcl: No such file or directory
```
As you can see, the file seems to have the right permissions, but I can't run it.
(There was a reboot after the transfer to the Tivo).

Any ideas?


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## Raisltin Majere (Mar 13, 2004)

Did you transfer in binary mode?


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

As Mr Majere says, looks like you've transferred in txt or auto mode.

"bash: ./bufferhack32a.tcl: No such file or directory"

Doesn't necessarily mean it can't find bufferhack32a.tcl, it can mean that it's running bufferhack32a.tcl but has encountered a file-not-found error from one of the lines of the program. 

If you transfer in text mode a ^M is appended to each line, which TCL couldn't care less about, but bash (which executes the file as far as the first line, which tells it which shell should run the rest of the file) does!


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## RichardJH (Oct 7, 2002)

Its a long time since I set my Live buffer to 120 mins but I seem to remember that it was done via Tivoweb hackman.
I may be wrong. 
I just checked my sysinit.author and it doesn't have any reference to bufferhack and the 120 min bufferhack has survived many a reboot so I am pretty sure it is being handled by Hackman


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Bufferhack both changes the setting in the MFS database, and patches the main tivoapp binary (the GUI) . 
Both are one-off alterations that survive reboots.



Pete77 said:


> There is no reason the buffer was originally only half an hour


I think it was probably designed that way so you usually have less than a whole program in the buffer at any one time.

Things get complicated if you are 2 hours behind real time, and have a few programs in the buffer...
Press record, Which should tivo record:

1) the program currently broadcasting
2) the timeshifted program
3) one in between, 
4) all three
5) or give you a menu to choose?

Tivo currently does option 1) and discards the rest of the buffer.
I wrote a hack to do option 2) and 3) here

None of that should dissuade you though, as a bigger buffer is always better


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

My guess on the reason for 30 mins is just that half an hour of Best was quite a big enough slice of the measly 40Gb hard disk space ta very much!"


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## ericd121 (Dec 12, 2002)

Raisltin Majere said:


> Did you transfer in binary mode?


It would appear not. 

Odd, as I had the transfer mode set to Auto and it's worked every time until today. 

Thanks, everyone. :up:


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Auto = bad! 

Your FTP client will see its a text file and send it a line at a time with extra CRs (oris it extra LFs, can't remember) at the end of each line. This will break standalone TCL scripts when bash tries to run them, but TivoWeb modules, which aren't directly executed by bash, will survive fine.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

mikerr said:


> Tivo currently does option 1) and discards the rest of the buffer.
> 
> I wrote a hack to do option 2) and 3) here
> 
> None of that should dissuade you though, as a bigger buffer is always better


I'm not sure I ever quite followed the logic of how that hack actually operates in practice though Mike. The instructions for it seemed more than a little confusing.

The last time I wanted to record a program that was not the current program in my 3 hour buffer I tried to do so by setting a Manual Recording for the time period in questions (all of which was held in the Live Buffer) but my Tivo then refused to let me set this recording on the basis that it was in the past.


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## ColinYounger (Aug 9, 2006)

So why not report that in the right thread?!


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

ColinYounger said:


> So why not report that in the right thread?!


Isn't this thread also about the Live Buffer then?


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

I've been using a 2 hour buffer on my S1 in mode 0 for a few years with zero issues.

Well zero if you ignore the fact that you can't hit record to grab a show in the buffer that has already ended in real time.


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

ciper said:


> I've been using a 2 hour buffer on my S1 in mode 0 for a few years with zero issues.
> 
> Well zero if you ignore the fact that you can't hit record to grab a show in the buffer that has already ended in real time.


Just set a manual record (by time/channel) with the time in the past and it will grab the previous program. The hack referred to above just semi-automates that process.


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## rondun (Jan 24, 2006)

OK a while back I extended the live buffer to 1 hr and decided last night to make it 2 hours.
I couldn't quite remember how I did it last time so stumbled across this thread and used bufferhack within hackman on tivoweb to do it. (although I am pretty sure I did it a different way before.)

Anyway now I have a working 2 hour buffer but the problem is I keep losing connection with my tivo.
Tivoweb will load up half a page then lose connection, same with telnet- I can get in but as soon as I try to change directory, list etc it also drops out.
Same for ftp.
Telnet may come back again after a short while, but I still can't do anything useful - tivoweb requires a reboot.

So, what did I do - is this a common complaint of extending the buffer?

When I ran bufferhack it seemed to work ok, but I did lose the ability to do anything with the remote control for a while - but it cleared itself after a couple of minutes and has been working ok since.

Daily call worked ok through the network this morning and the only other thing I've noticed is that autospace has stopped working.

any ideas?
cheers


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