# Changing bitrate & resolution (Mode 0)



## sanderton

I know you can change the bitrate and resolution used by the MPEG chip on US stanadalone Series 1s.

Has anyone tried this with a UK machine?

The resolution settings for US machines are well understood, but do we know what the numbers are for ours?


----------



## Sneals2000

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I know you can change the bitrate and resolution used by the MPEG chip on US stanadalone Series 1s.
> 
> Has anyone tried this with a UK machine?
> 
> The resolution settings for US machines are well understood, but do we know what the numbers are for ours? *


I was interested in this as well - as I find the horizontal subsampling the most annoying thing about Tivo (especially the chroma) However ISTR that whilst people have had a good level of success modifying US Tivos to run at 720 samples horizontally, when this was tried on UK models there were problems with positioning and green bands appearing to one side of the picture?

I think that people HAVE managed to improve the picture quality at the standard resolutions by increasing the bit rate though.


----------



## mrtickle

I did a lot of experimenting with this last week as it happens! Knowing that I was going to replace the drive I had nothing to lose!

Assuming you have tivoweb of course and know how to use the resource editor (press return to submit each and every change you make; select the "update resources" link after doing them all). I measured these resolutions (*):

0 = 720x576 
4 = 544x576 "best"
2 = 480x576 "high"
1 = 352x576 "basic"/"medium"

Selecting resolution "0" (I modified my "high" setting as I don't use it much) did have the problems you mentioned. Basically the picture is offset to the left quite a bit and up a little bit. But the increase in resolution was certainly noticeable.

The other main thing I noticed was that we don't have VBR. Even with "save disc space" turned on, tivo still doesn't use VBR mode. I'm suspicious that this is because both the "DBSBestVBRBitrate" and "DBSBestMAXBitrate" are set to the exact same value (for example Best quality with Sky digital lineup). When you start a recording the tvlog says "using CBR, bitRate=5960000, maxBitrate=5960000" nomatter whether you have Save Disc Space on or off. If you then set the VBRBitrate to a different (lower) value, tivo reports that it is using VBR mode in the logs.

I also changed the live buffer to Medium 

There is also this thread:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=108462&highlight=bitrate

I set my "Basic" to 800000 and 850000 values (NB: this made it use VBR mode, even in Basic!). It looked fantasically awful - like old AVI files where the colour disappears and you get blotches of grey. It also made the tivo say I had 314 hours of Basic quality on my 138GB drive.

HTH


----------



## sanderton

Interesting; I will have a play.

If VBR is not set up right (It's the AltBitrate settings for VBR mode isn't it?) then are those who report lower quality suffering from a placebo affect?

(Personally I've never been able to tell the difference so I feel vindicated!)

I only use Basic for Radio, so will se how low you can go!


----------



## mrtickle

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *Interesting; I will have a play.
> 
> If VBR is not set up right (It's the AltBitrate settings for VBR mode isn't it?) then are those who report lower quality suffering from a placebo affect?
> *


To answer the question - dunno 

But I don't think that the AltBitrate page controls VBR. You'll see two values for each quality setting - I think the one with "VBR" in it controls VBR.

My suspicion is that the Alt page is for the 2nd tuner on DirecTivos. Annoyingly, all guides seem to say "change them all just in case" without any more discussion 

On my machine I didn't touch the Alt page - and I only edited the DBS values on the main Bitrates page. This was after trial and error of setting all 6 possibilites (DBS, CAT, Roof in Bit and Alt) to slightly different values and seeing which values made it into the logfile!)



> *
> (Personally I've never been able to tell the difference so I feel vindicated!)
> *


Indeed. I set Best from 5960000, 5960000 to 5660000, 5960000. This made it start to use VBR. An hour of Best went from 2580MB down to 1800MB (reported sizes from tivoweb) and I couldn't really tell unless I looked very hard that it was different.



> *
> I only use Basic for Radio, so will se how low you can go! *


Yes that was the idea of the chap on the other thread . I noticed that even on the Sky digibox radio screens, where the only thing that changes is the time - once a minute - it takes a very long time to settle down to a clear image!


----------



## sanderton

OK, I've done a bit of fiddling!

Here are some stills of the results .

They are quite large, I'm afraid; the page is ~2Mb.

Here are the Sky red dots in the two resolutions:

















To do this I reset Medium resolution to be resolution = 0 and upped its bitrarte to 7000000.

Although the screengrabs show a green area on the right, it does not appear on my TV. I see a perfectly normal looking picture. It seems from comparing the captions that there is a slight left shift - but it's not noticeable unless you are looking for it.

You can also see from the artifacting on the caption that the bitrate increase has had a noticeable effect.

The "real" resolutions of the two (ie, the picture area, not black or green bars) are 533 x 568 in Best and 677 x 568 in my edited Medium, so the resolution increase is real!

I may have to lash out on another 120Gb drive to allow me to up the bitrate and res!


----------



## mrtickle

Cool, glad you got it working! I can only just see the green bar on my TV too - although I do have the overscan reduced to minimum.


----------



## Brownedger

Are you saying that VBR doesn't actually work on the normal Tivo's or just the upgraded Turbonet Tivo's?


----------



## sanderton

All TiVos.


----------



## Brownedger

Ok is it working in the latest American release ver.3.0?


----------



## sanderton

I assume so. To be honest it looks like a mistake by the people rolling out the UK version - the configuartion file variables just look like they are set wrong, with the max and min bitrate set to be the same!

I'm going to try boosting Best by leaving the minimum at the current CBR level but giving it the option of adding maybe 1Mbps at peaks to see if that helps it with fast moving sports.


----------



## NickDvl

For us lesser mortals, how many hours of recording time can you get out of those higher bitrate/resolution settings on a 120GB drive? Are there any other side-effects besides the green strip on the right? Do the settings survive a reboot?

I've always found the horizontal resolution somewhat lacking on widescreen broadcasts, would be great if it could be improved...


----------



## 10203

Is there a list of the resolution modes somewhere? Is there a mode 3?  I tried a search of the forums and read the Philips datasheet but couldn't find anything.

Mode 0 does look much better, but on my TV the 'wide screen' mode chops a bit too much off the left hand side for it to be useable. 

NickDvl: Yes, the settings survive reboots - you have to reboot after you've changed the settings to make them take effect.

What's the lowest bitrate anyone's managed to get working? Down at around 600000 I get a "kb per second too small" message in tverr (and other errors in the kernel log) and the rate appears to default to some higher value.


----------



## mrtickle

Note that changing the resolution doesn't alter the recording capacity, only changing the bitrate does. When I changed my high from res 2 to 0 the reported capacity was the same, because the bitrate was the same. The result is that the same amount of movement will produce more artefacts than before unless you increase the bitrate as well.

According to the other thread I found tivo defaults to Best quality if the bitrate is too small. When it happened to me it basically lied in the tvlog (said it was using the bitrate I had set, but didn't). I didn't think of checking the other logs!
650000 was too low when I tried. 675000 worked.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I assume so. To be honest it looks like a mistake by the people rolling out the UK version - the configuartion file variables just look like they are set wrong, with the max and min bitrate set to be the same!
> 
> I'm going to try boosting Best by leaving the minimum at the current CBR level but giving it the option of adding maybe 1Mbps at peaks to see if that helps it with fast moving sports. *


Have you tried this yet ? I'd be interested to know how you got on.

As an aside, I was reluctant to up my bitrate in case I caused the mpeg chip to overheat, though for all I know it may be operating well within it's design limits. Can anyone comment ?


----------



## rharnwel

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *Have you tried this yet ? I'd be interested to know how you got on.
> 
> As an aside, I was reluctant to up my bitrate in case I caused the mpeg chip to overheat, though for all I know it may be operating well within it's design limits. Can anyone comment ? *


Surely the higher the bitrate, the less demand on the MPEG chip....?


----------



## sanderton

I'd be surprised if you could damage the chip from a software setting.


----------



## Dapper Dan

I was thinking of it as a form of overclocking. I'm sure that someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but if you make a chip work harder it runs hotter, this in turn increases the rate of electron migration which eventually causes the chip to fail.


----------



## iankb

But, as rharnwel says, the higher the bitrate, the lower the amount of work required to compress it.

Ian.


----------



## sanderton

The chip is good for up to 15Mbs so, I doubt I'll stress it at 7. The HD is another matter!

http://products.sel.sony.com/semi/PDF/CXD1922Q.pdf


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by iankb _
> *But, as rharnwel says, the higher the bitrate, the lower the amount of work required to compress it.
> 
> Ian. *


I'm sure that you're both right, it justs seems so counter-intuitive that you should be getting higher quality for less effort, surely you have to pay somewhere along the line ?


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *I'm sure that you're both right, it justs seems so counter-intuitive that you should be getting higher quality for less effort, surely you have to pay somewhere along the line ? *


Disk space.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## sp99

> _Originally posted by mrtickle _
> *I did a lot of experimenting with this last week as it happens! Knowing that I was going to replace the drive I had nothing to lose!
> 
> Assuming you have tivoweb of course and know how to use the resource editor (press return to submit each and every change you make; select the "update resources" link after doing them all). I measured these resolutions (*):
> 
> 0 = 720x576
> 4 = 544x576 "best"
> 2 = 480x576 "high"
> 1 = 352x576 "basic"/"medium"
> 
> Selecting resolution "0" (I modified my "high" setting as I don't use it much) did have the problems you mentioned. Basically the picture is offset to the left quite a bit and up a little bit. But the increase in resolution was certainly noticeable.
> HTH *


Broadcast spec for a composite signal at 720 x 576 only has 702 visible (active ? ) lines with the rest being used for VBI, windscreen switching etc..
- I can't remember for component signals but maybe Tivo have used this as their guide.

It could be worth a try .

p.s. have lurked for a year, so thanks to everyone for your informative posts.


----------



## sanderton

The resolutions are all either DVD or DVB standard resolutions or bastardised versions of them (horizontal form one and vertical from another), so presumably are influences by the encoder/decoder chips options.

In the USA TiVos tend to be 480 x 480 I think.


----------



## mrtickle

The USA series 1 tivos have exactly the same horizontal res as the figures above, but with "480" everywhere I put "576".

As far as DVD goes, I believe both 720x576 and 702x576 are valid. I hear what you say about VBI but in the case of the UK tivo the shift up/left is way off. Presumably all the other settings to define the screen were left at the US default timing values, which is fair enough as this resolution isn't available to the user normally so would never be used.

HTH


----------



## 10203

_Originally posted by mrtickle _
*Presumably all the other settings to define the screen were left at the US default timing values, which is fair enough as this resolution isn't available to the user normally so would never be used.*

Wonder if we can change them... Resolution 0 looks better than res 4 (unsurprisingly!).


----------



## xxxx

An interesting topic.
Could those who have experimented give a full list of settings that they think look best for RGB widescreen on a UK Tivo? Disk space no object. With and without VBR would be nice.

On the odd occasions when I have experimented with this (in order to get recordings that are directly compatible with DVD resolution) I have become bogged down with settings that only work on US Tivos. In the end I gave up.

Banned uses aside, I would really like to improve on the UK Tivo "best" setting for day to day recodings as I can clearly see the quality drop from live and have plenty of disk space. I suspect that I am not alone.


----------



## Dibblah

Unfortunately, one thing that MPEG doesn't handle too well are sudden transitions. With the green bar running down the side of the screen, you have a constant "drain" on available bitrate.

Unless we can tune the parameters of the SA7118E, the 0 resolution is mostly useless.

Oh. And yes, it's easy to tune it - However, on every channel change it gets reset. I was looking a while back for a 'portable' way to effectively copy PALMod (Tridge's), but got lost too quickly.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## sanderton

I don't think the green bar has any effect on anything. It seems to just appears on screen grabs and in PC video editing software which is aware what the pixel size of the image is! Certainly it does not appear on my TV. The sharpness of the transition from black to green in the still suggests to me that it's not a part of the MPEG encoded signal, just an artifact of the display software.

The main problem with Resolution 0 is that a part of the far left of the screen is not encoded at all. This appears to be a pretty small part, if you look at the pics I posted above, but you will always have that trade off.

The MPEG chip is capable of far higher bitrates than TiVo uses, but with a recording stream and a playback stream happening simultaneously you get very close to the limits of the IDE/HD infrastructure.


----------



## 10203

_Originally posted by Dibblah _
*And yes, it's easy to tune it*

Yeay!

*However, on every channel change it gets reset.*

Ah 

*I was looking a while back for a 'portable' way to effectively copy PALMod (Tridge's), but got lost too quickly.*

Have you got a link to Tridge's site handy? How do you mean portable?


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by LJ _
> *Originally posted by Dibblah
> And yes, it's easy to tune it
> 
> Yeay!
> 
> However, on every channel change it gets reset.
> 
> Ah
> 
> I was looking a while back for a 'portable' way to effectively copy PALMod (Tridge's), but got lost too quickly.
> 
> Have you got a link to Tridge's site handy? How do you mean portable? *


I think that this is what you want:

http://pserver.samba.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/tivo/palkit/?hideattic=0&only_with_tag=MAIN#dirlist


----------



## 10203

Thanks. Will have a look later...


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by xxxx _
*I suspect that I am not alone. *

Looks like I was wrong.


----------



## 10203

Nono... I'd like to do the same. Mode 0 recordings, but without bits chopped off! 'Later' hasn't arrived yet for me


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *Originally posted by xxxx
> I suspect that I am not alone.
> 
> Looks like I was wrong.  *


You aren't alone... However, I've only just got my spare Tivo working again.

You remember I said a while ago that I'd bust it by telling it it had 4Mb of RAM? Well, I fixed it.

Thanks to Mr Stanley (For the really sharp blades), I now have 2 UK SAs with socketed PROMs.

Final solution was to flash the PROM on the now completely doorstopped Tivo on the working one. And it was... Very hair-raising at some points.

I started with 2 working Tivos. I managed to break one. Half way through socketing the previously OK one up, I seemed to have busted it. Imagine the scene: Unwatched Corrie, Sex and the City, etc. I almost started looking for plane tickets.

Anyway. I intend doing some hacking about with this issue when I have a large enough HD available (the spare Tivo's HD went into the server).

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## mrtickle

Excellent news! Let us know if you need testers when the time comes 

LJ's red dot script already checks for recordings starting and ending, perhaps some of this code could be useful for something which resets the paramters every time tivo changes channel?

My wishlist would be the paramters for mode 0, the vertical shift in all modes, and the black crushing/white clipping.



> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I don't think the green bar has any effect on anything. It seems to just appears on screen grabs and in PC video editing software which is aware what the pixel size of the image is! Certainly it does not appear on my TV. The sharpness of the transition from black to green in the still suggests to me that it's not a part of the MPEG encoded signal, just an artifact of the display software.
> *


I'd cautiously disagree there. I _think_ that what is happening is that the tivo is "looking" at the wrong portion of the input signal at the time it creates the recording. It is encoding a space of picture which is offset. The parts where there was physically no signal end up as "green" in the mpeg data. So this is why it is clearly visible on a PC capture card - it's in the recording.


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by mrtickle _
> *
> 
> My wishlist would be the paramters for mode 0, the vertical shift in all modes, and the black crushing/white clipping.
> 
> *


I'd second that. esp. the crushing/clipping thing which for me renders the RGB unusable.



> _Originally posted by mrtickle _
> *
> 
> I'd cautiously disagree there. I think that what is happening is that the tivo is "looking" at the wrong portion of the input signal at the time it creates the recording. It is encoding a space of picture which is offset. The parts where there was physically no signal end up as "green" in the mpeg data. So this is why it is clearly visible on a PC capture card - it's in the recording. *


Ok, but I think we can agree that it has not recorded an actual green colour, just a "no signal" byte which is being represented on PC as green (but is ignored by my TV).


----------



## 10203

Found a useful page showing chip details here. Not all the chips match what's in my TiVo, but there're some links that might come in useful...

_Originally posted by Dibblah _
*Unless we can tune the parameters of the SA7118E, the 0 resolution is mostly useless.*

I'm confused  Why do we need to change the parameters of the SAA7118E? The 7118's a decoder. Or am I missing something? Do we need to change encoder and decoder parameters?

The MPEG encoder looks like chip 23 (Sony CXD1922Q). (Some datasheets here)

*Oh. And yes, it's easy to tune it - However, on every channel change it gets reset. I was looking a while back for a 'portable' way to effectively copy PALMod (Tridge's), but got lost too quickly.*

I'm confused again  What does setting the "Resolution" in the Resource Editor actually do?

Time to search for more Sony datasheets...


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by LJ _
> *Found a useful page showing chip details here. Not all the chips match what's in my TiVo, but there're some links that might come in useful...
> 
> Originally posted by Dibblah
> Unless we can tune the parameters of the SA7118E, the 0 resolution is mostly useless.
> 
> I'm confused  Why do we need to change the parameters of the SAA7118E? The 7118's a decoder. Or am I missing something? Do we need to change encoder and decoder parameters?
> 
> The MPEG encoder looks like chip 23 (Sony CXD1922Q). (Some datasheets here)
> 
> Oh. And yes, it's easy to tune it - However, on every channel change it gets reset. I was looking a while back for a 'portable' way to effectively copy PALMod (Tridge's), but got lost too quickly.
> 
> I'm confused again  What does setting the "Resolution" in the Resource Editor actually do?
> 
> Time to search for more Sony datasheets... *


Quote from the link for the datasheet in your post:

The SAA7118E is a video capture device for applications at the image port of VGA controllers.

It's the frontend to the CXD1922Q. It handles the messy bits of A/D, etc.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## Dibblah

After having had a bit of a look around the Tivo, the resolution / settings tables appear to be hardcoded in fpga7114.o. So all we need is a binary patch.

Looking at it now, however, this WILL be different for everyone's setup.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## sanderton

"Everyone" as in UK/US, or er, everyone!


----------



## Dibblah

Everyone as in everyone with different preferences, TVs, eyes, etc.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## Modan

Well keep us posted on how you are getting on. I take it you mean that everyon will want different settings rather than everyone will start with a different source file?

Well I look forward to your findings. I might even be persuaded to right an editor for this once you have it figured out. Too much time on my hands right now


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by Dibblah _
> *After having had a bit of a look around the Tivo, the resolution / settings tables appear to be hardcoded in fpga7114.o. So all we need is a binary patch.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Allan. *


... or you could do what tridge did and install a bypass function on calls inside binary kernel modules. Here's a link:

http://tivo.samba.org/download/tridge/

which also points at a very detailed pdf document describing the SAA7114 chip. It appears (page 131-132) that you need to poke about in I2C bus addresses 80 to BF.


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by Dibblah _
> *Unfortunately, one thing that MPEG doesn't handle too well are sudden transitions. With the green bar running down the side of the screen, you have a constant "drain" on available bitrate.
> 
> Unless we can tune the parameters of the SA7118E, the 0 resolution is mostly useless.
> 
> Oh. And yes, it's easy to tune it - However, on every channel change it gets reset. I was looking a while back for a 'portable' way to effectively copy PALMod (Tridge's), but got lost too quickly.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Allan. *


Really? Like I said here?


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *... or you could do what tridge did and install a bypass function on calls inside binary kernel modules. Here's a link:
> 
> http://tivo.samba.org/download/tridge/
> 
> which also points at a very detailed pdf document describing the SAA7114 chip. It appears (page 131-132) that you need to poke about in I2C bus addresses 80 to BF. *


Yes, I could do. There are differences on the UK Tivo - 
It's a 7118.
It's a different i2c address.

And this means you go through an extra indirection for _every_ i2c call on the Tivo. Which is quite a few. I'd rather just patch the table referenced by SAA7112CaptureSize directly.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by Dibblah _
> *
> 
> ...... I'd rather just patch the table referenced by SAA7112CaptureSize directly.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Allan. *


Ok, I look forward to seeing whatever you come up with


----------



## kwangomango

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I'd second that. esp. the crushing/clipping thing which for me renders the RGB unusable.
> *


Have you tried setting Tivo to output RGB but accept PAL as input. Obviously your digibox needs to be set to output PAL also. I have only tried this on my portable at the mo, but whites seem less intense and blacks more detailed.


----------



## mrtickle

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *
> Ok, but I think we can agree that it has not recorded an actual green colour, just a "no signal" byte which is being represented on PC as green (but is ignored by my TV). *


On my TV (with a lot less overscan I suspect) I could actually see the green. I no longer have a res-0 recording to recheck it though. Also I vaguely remember reading that people with the early (pre-1.5.2) software reported "flashing green at the top of the picture" - and I've alway been suspicious that the fix to that was more of a "bodge" (move the whole screen up and hide the problem).



> _Originally posted by LJ _
> 
> I'm confused again  What does setting the "Resolution" in the Resource Editor actually do?
> 
> Time to search for more Sony datasheets... [/B]


You are awfully confused aren't you  It sets one of four resolutions:

0 = 720x576
4 = 544x576 "best"
2 = 480x576 "high"
1 = 352x576 "basic"/"medium"

...in the same way that setting the bitrate value affect the bitrates used in a recording.



> _Originally posted by kwangomango _
> *Have you tried setting Tivo to output RGB but accept PAL as input. Obviously your digibox needs to be set to output PAL also. I have only tried this on my portable at the mo, but whites seem less intense and blacks more detailed. *


Hmm, that could be worth a try...


----------



## bobnick

Is resolution 0 the same as the 'extreme' quality setting that's available in version 5 of the tivo software?

- Oh, I've just seen your other post in another thread where you say it is!

I'm feeling all left behind in this Tivo Revolution, what with being stuck with version 2.5.5 - the americans only need another 0.1's worth of improvements, and the can go and laud over us that their Tivo's are twice as advanced as ours


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by mrtickle _
> *On my TV (with a lot less overscan I suspect) I could actually see the green. *


I guess it's down the the TV then - I don't think its' overscan related, as if you look at the screengrab of the res-0 video, you'll see there is a vast area of green to the right. There's no way I have that much overscan (in fact I've minimised it through the service menus).

I have seen similar - in fact larger - green zones on Medium res TiVo video too.


----------



## ccwf

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *If VBR is not set up right (It's the AltBitrate settings for VBR mode isn't it?) then are those who report lower quality suffering from a placebo affect?
> 
> (Personally I've never been able to tell the difference so I feel vindicated!)*


 It should be easy to tell whether or not untweaked UK TiVos have functioning VBR. For example, look in the log files to see how many minutes each full-length allocated block lasts on average. Then toggle the VBR/CBR setting, record or watch the live buffer for an hour, and see how long the blocks last now. With high-quality slow-moving video input, the difference should be quite noticeable if VBR is working. An audio channel might be a good test.

Also, the min bitrate isn't a minimum, I'm almost certain.


----------



## 10203

Had some time to have a look around... Dibblah how do these sound:

Offset a7f4 for the generic 7118 settings, which are in byte pairs - first byte is the sub address, second the value to load.

Offset a934 for the mode zero specific settings (I'm guessing there are three).

Now to try patching a version...


----------



## 10203

Err, mebbe it's not a934... lots of green vertical bars everywhere 

a880 seems to work though 

...and it helps if you remember to flag rc.sysinit as executable


----------



## 10203

Mods have been running fine on my TiVo for a couple of days now - any one else want to try them? Knocked up a page here.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by LJ _
> *Mods have been running fine on my TiVo for a couple of days now - any one else want to try them? Knocked up a page here. *


I'll try this tonight. What have you changed ?


----------



## Dibblah

Getting a 403 - Forbidden on the actual module download.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## sanderton

Great stuff.

This looks like a typo in the instructions:

cp fpga7114.*0* fpga7114.o.original


----------



## xxxx

I'd like to try this but as a complete Linux novice can I be sure that the command prompt instructions given will work with my twin drive Tivo with Turbonet, anti-teletext-bug OS (which I understand is on a different partition to normal), etc. etc.?
Having got it all working perfectly I don't want to muck it up!


----------



## technograndad

> _Originally posted by LJ _
> *Mods have been running fine on my TiVo for a couple of days now - any one else want to try them? Knocked up a page here. *


I'm getting a 'forbidden' from that link too.

What exactly does this do? Remove the green verical bar when in mode 0? - or is that just wishful thinking on my part 

(fingers crossed!)


----------



## 10203

Fixed the typo, fixed the Error 403.

What this does is modify what I believe are the default settings for the SAA7118E for all modes:


Code:


Device  Sub   Default  New   Purpose
0x42    0x2A  0xB1     0x90  Luminance brightness - Set lower
0x42    0x2B  0x60     0x4A  Luminance contrast - Set lower
0x42    0x2C  0x5D     0x49  Chrominance saturation - Set lower

And what I think are the settings for mode 0:


Code:


Device  Sub   Default  New   Purpose
0x42    0x06  0xCB     0xC3  Horizontal sync start - move left

I guess the values need a bit more tweaking - the colour is still a bit rich (to my eyes anyway  )


----------



## Dibblah

Hmmm... Only just noticed this. It seems to break RF input.

Looking to see why now.

<edit>
Dunno what was happening, but I can't reproduce it. Now. Everyone install this. 
</edit>

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## technograndad

Yay! It certainly fixed the mode 0 vertical green bar. There's still an upwards shift but I think that might be in all resolutions., and it's not too severe.

I used BBC3's closedown screen, covering some text with a sheet of paper and swithing between live and aux you'll see the text shift upwards by what I guess would be about 20 pixels.

I dont use the RF input so I'm ok with this fix so far. Love it!!


----------



## xxxx

In spite of not being sure about compatibility with my set up I couldn't resist this so I tried it.
It seems to work fine though I've dropped from 53hrs to 39hrs (I'll have to buy a second 120Gb drive to replace the orgininal Maxtor).
Noticeable increase in picture quality (why isn't this option on as standard on the Tivo? - lack of disk space?) and, above all, my blue shift problem has completely disappeared, and that's just plain brilliant! Woo-hoo!


----------



## sanderton

Lack of disk space - remember back in 2000 when this was being set up a 40Gb disk was BIG!


----------



## xxxx

Yes. The standard 40Gb drive was considered large but only gave 12hrs at "best". Use resolution 0 and that drops to about 9. Interesting that the possibility was built in though.

I just looked online and I can get a 120Gb WD with 3 year warranty delivered to me tomorrow for £80 ........ I'm tempted.


----------



## cyril

Since a 600gb TiVo is now possible, that would give 135 hours resolution zero, maybe 100 hours if we maxed out the bitrate too.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> * ... It seems to work fine though I've dropped from 53hrs to 39hrs *


I have a feeling that this might be misleading. I think it's a worse case scenario, i.e assume that everything gets recorded at the VBR (which I presume you've increased).


----------



## xxxx

I increased the DBSBEST max br setting to 8000000 but didn't yet adjust the DBSBEST var br setting. I have disk saving set to "on" but IIRC there was talk the other day that this didn't have any effect on UK Tivos that weren't using "0" resolution. Though of course I'm now using "0" resolution. I have yet to do a test to see if this "0" resolution and 8000000 bitrate setting corresponds to a valid DVD format or not. I hope that it will. Otherwise I shall set the bitrate to something that is DVD compliant.

In the meantime should I change the DBSBEST var br setting to 8000000 also and is VBR really active on resolution 0, or should I just switch disk saving off?

I'm not unduly bothered by the reduction in available recording time as I can always change my drive 2 to 120Gb, thus getting a total of 80hrs.


----------



## sanderton

The VBR is inactive in UK TiVos because the Max and Min bitrate values are the same. If you've increased the Max and left the Min unchanged, then VBR is now active for you.


----------



## xxxx

The min setting seems only to be in the AltBitrate table which I haven't touched as I don't know what it's for.

All my changes were made in the Bitrate table and I now have :

Resolution = 0
DBSBESTMAXBR = 8 000 000 (from 5 960 000)
DBSBESTVARBR = 8 000 000 (from 5 960 000)

The AltBitrate table settings are still at the default.


----------



## sanderton

Then you are on CBR at 8 Mbps.


----------



## technograndad

I've read on another forum that the bitrate includes a fixed 160000bps, allegedly for audio.

So where previously best was 5960000 it was really 5.8Mbps video.

It's a small point but if someone was aiming *specifically* for 8000000 bitrate it would need to be specified as 8160000.

Has anyone calculated a 'good' figure for mode 0? Are there any mathematically 'sweet' numbers?

John


----------



## sanderton

To get the same bits per pixel per second as Best, Res0 would have to be 7,676,467, so 8,000,000 looks fair enough.


----------



## Dapper Dan

I've just tried the fpga mod and it works.

Unfortunately, in my setup the picture quality is worse using mode 0 (extreme ?) compared with mode 4 (best), given the same bitrates (5960000 VBR and 7000000 MAX), it looks fuzzier. I thought this might be due to the bitrates, so I upped them to 7888235 VBR and 9264706 MAX (factor of 720/544). This gave me a very bad picture, lots of pixellation and green 'splodges'. Perhaps if the chip is good for 1.5Mbs (is that input and output?) then we shouldn't be going for more than half of this, so 7500000 would be a practical MAX.


----------



## Dapper Dan

Set res 0 to 7500000 7500000 and found that Tivo would no longer reboot properly, just sat there after the usual messages with a black screen, no visible response from the remote. Pulling the power lead didn't help either. Don't really know why this happened because I changed the settings for medium and this is never used unless I explicitly tell it to. Fortunately I was still able to telnet in so I put the old fpga7114.o back and all is well again, phew!


----------



## mrtickle

Excellent stuff . Just to clarify, as I'm getting a big bogged down in all the different chips:

Philips SAA7118E video decoder/scaler
- is this the one we altered at the weekend, to alter the colour output? (device 8C - all this stuff:
iicset 0x8Ch 0x39h 20 (colour)
iicset 0x8Ch 0x38h 21 (luminance))

Sony CXD1922Q video encoder

IBM MPEGCS22 video decoder/OSD generator:

Philips SAA7128H video encoder
- this is the one LJ's patch affects? device 0x42

a block diagram of the tivo would be nice if anyone's got time 

My understanding is that LJ's change fixes the mode 0 and expands the range of signals at recording time. So the tweaks to the output are still worth doing?


----------



## xxxx

I'm not clear about this.

sanderton wrote:
>If you've increased the Max and left the Min unchanged, then VBR is now active for you.

I wrote:
>The min setting seems only to be in the AltBitrate table which I haven't touched as I don't know what it's for.
Resolution = 0
DBSBESTMAXBR = 8 000 000 (from 5 960 000)
DBSBESTVARBR = 8 000 000 (from 5 960 000)

sanderton wrote:
>Then you are on CBR at 8 Mbps.

Now it seems to me that my min setting (in AltBitrate) is unchanged and the max setting (in Bitrate) is increased therefore I should be on VBR. Or am I still missing something?


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
*Unfortunately, in my setup the picture quality is worse using mode 0 (extreme ?) compared with mode 4 (best), given the same bitrates (5960000 VBR and 7000000 MAX), it looks fuzzier. I thought this might be due to the bitrates, so I upped them to 7888235 VBR and 9264706 MAX (factor of 720/544). This gave me a very bad picture, lots of pixellation and green 'splodges'. Perhaps if the chip is good for 1.5Mbs (is that input and output?) then we shouldn't be going for more than half of this, so 7500000 would be a practical MAX. *

I also notice a slight problem with the 8 000 000 br setting. I seem to get occasional white flashes near the bottom right of the screen, as though the Tivo can't keep up with the picture. It's not the end of the world and I can't say I notice anything else wrong with the picture at that setting but the general improvement in picture quality without my blue shift problem is so great that it's hard to notice anything else.

I was about to try some other settings (7 500 000 or 7 000 000) for the max br until I read the other post about the Tivo not booting and that put me off! I may just put it back to 5 960 000 and see what happens for a while.


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *I'm not clear about this.
> 
> sanderton wrote:
> >If you've increased the Max and left the Min unchanged, then VBR is now active for you.
> 
> I wrote:
> >The min setting seems only to be in the AltBitrate table which I haven't touched as I don't know what it's for.
> Resolution = 0
> DBSBESTMAXBR = 8 000 000 (from 5 960 000)
> DBSBESTVARBR = 8 000 000 (from 5 960 000)
> 
> sanderton wrote:
> >Then you are on CBR at 8 Mbps.
> 
> Now it seems to me that my min setting (in AltBitrate) is unchanged and the max setting (in Bitrate) is increased therefore I should be on VBR. Or am I still missing something? *


The consensus is that AltBitrate does nothing on UK TiVos.

If the two settings on the Bitrate page determine the range that VBR works over, and if the two are the same, then you have effectively fixed the bitrate whether "Save Disk Space" is on or not.


----------



## ccwf

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *If the two settings on the Bitrate page determine the range that VBR works over*


 Again, this is definitely not the case for U.S. TiVos. For us, the VBR bitrate is either the max VBR bitrate or a predicted average bitrate and not the minimum bitrate used by VBR.


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by ccwf _
> *Again, this is definitely not the case for U.S. TiVos. For us, the VBR bitrate is either the max VBR bitrate or a predicted average bitrate and not the minimum bitrate used by VBR. *


Whatever the two numbers actually represent, they are different on US TiVos, yes? On UK ones the two numbers have the same value.


----------



## ccwf

They are different for series 1 U.S. TiVos. I believe that VBR is a feature of the new TiVo+DVD combos, so I would assume the numbers are different for them, too.

However, series 2 standalone TiVos have VBR disabled; the menu item to Save Disk Space is not even present. I do not know if the values are the same or different for those TiVos.

Also, I'll add that TiVolutionary long ago indicated that VBR used an average bitrate with the ability to burst above that. However, he was an official TiVo advocate and not a technical expert, so there is some chance that information is not correct.


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by xxxx _
*I also notice a slight problem with the 8 000 000 br setting. I seem to get occasional white flashes near the bottom right of the screen, as though the Tivo can't keep up with the picture.*

In the end I also found that there were lots of dropped mpeg frames that correspond with the white flashes at the bottom right of the screen as output by the Tivo. So I assume that 8 000 000 is much too high.

In the absence of anything better I reset both bitrate settings to 5 960 000 (BTW IFOEdit confirms that only 5 800 000 is video with 160 000 taken up by the audio) and IFOEdit is absolutely delighted with the resulting 720x576 DVD format. Perfect results with no green band.

Many thanks to LJ for the file and instructions.


----------



## sanderton

Hmm, but with a lower bitrate per pixel the artifacts etc should be quiet a bit worse, convenient as it is for the E-word.

Time to try a few tests with vales between 6000000 and 8000000 I think!


----------



## xxxx

Yes. I was about to test some other numbers in the range you mention when I saw the message about the non-booting Tivo on 7 500 000. This put me off making any more modifications though I don't understand why such a simple change should stop the Tivo from booting.
8 000 000 - 160 000 = 7 840 000 which isn't any sort of magic MPEG number that I recognise. Or does the Tivo br have to be some sort of multiple of the resolution, as suggested?

I can't see any extra artifacts to speak of though the general picture improvement without my blue shift problem is great enough to mask any such decrease in picture quality anyway.

All in all I am satified with the picture quality, the vanished green band and the DVD compliant resolution.
Though if anyone comes up with some working br numbers between 5 960 000 and 8 000 000 then I would like to try those.


----------



## Lysander

When I tried this, I started with a bitrate of 8M and got exactly the same symptoms - white flashes at the bottom of the screen. So I changed it to 7M which had worked successfully for me with Resolution 4.

Still got the white flashes! so this got me thinking. It is probably that the number isn't a great one for the number of pixels.

So, to get the same bitrate as Best I calculated that 5.8M needs to rise to 7.6M, just as has been previously described by sanderton. Then I added the 160,000 for the sound and bingo - no more white flashes.

I am using 7,836,000. Resolution 0. No ill effects yet...

BTW, I have kept the decoder changes intact as well to get the AUX and Live TV colours the same.

James


----------



## sanderton

That bitrate works fine for me.

Here are some revised still showing the effect of LJ's patch.

(Warning, large files!)

Screen images of Res 0

Excellent stuff chaps!


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by Lysander _
> *
> 
> I am using 7,836,000. Resolution 0. No ill effects yet...
> 
> James *


Are using this value for both VBR and MAX settings ?

(same question to sanderton)


----------



## Modan

Any chance of a res 0 to res 4 comparison (or does it not show up any difference on your screen-grabber?)


----------



## Dapper Dan

Not strictly part of this thread, but do the quality settings on the resource page have any effect (0, 40, 75 and 100) ? I don't see how they can if you're fixing the bitrate, and if you get can get a better quality compression for the same bitrate then why aren't they all at 100 ? Maybe they only affect VBR. I seem to remember changing them so that they no longer matched the resolution numbers (i.e set basic to 100), and when I recorded basic I got best quality instead (this was back before we knew that VBR wasn't working so everything was CBR).


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by Lysander _
*I am using 7,836,000. Resolution 0. No ill effects yet...

BTW, I have kept the decoder changes intact as well to get the AUX and Live TV colours the same.
*

I'll give that br a try and report back. Thanks.

Your comment about the AUX and "Live" picture makes me think that there was (is) indeed something wrong with my Tivo as it left the factory. Even with the altered fpga file the live picture is still significantly brighter and more contrasty than the AUX one though it is all a great deal better than it was before.
Given that I had that strange blue shift that no one else seems to have (and which was clearly to do with excessively high image settings as with the new fpga file it has now gone) I can only suppose that my colour/brightness/contrast settings need to be lowered even more to bring them into line with everyone else.

Something for the future.


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by xxxx _
*I'll give that br a try and report back. *

7 836 000 looks lovely on the TV screen but the MPEG in IFOEdit is full of glitches and dropped frames. Shame.

So far only 5 960 000 works well in MPEG for me.


----------



## technograndad

Eh.. How can that be? I thought the picture on screen was *exactly* what's been written to the disk. Hence if you press pause, you resume by reading that same data off the drive. Surely you'd see the same glitches? 

Perhaps the ext****** process is mangling the data.

John


----------



## Lysander

> Your comment about the AUX and "Live" picture makes me think that there was (is) indeed something wrong with my Tivo as it left the factory. Even with the altered fpga file the live picture is still significantly brighter and more contrasty than the AUX one though it is all a great deal better than it was before.


Max and VBR figures have been set the same on my Tivo.

I have also applied the output fix to lower the colours to the same as that on Aux, LJ's patch doesn't do this for me either. Click on the link in my signature, although I just applied the changes at the bash prompt, because putting them in the .author file caused lock up problems for me.

Cheers,

James


----------



## technograndad

> _Originally posted by Lysander _
> *... although I just applied the changes at the bash prompt, because putting them in the .author file caused lock up problems for me.
> *


Try puting this at the end of of /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit.author...

/var/hack/setrgb.sh &

Where setrgb.sh is a command script containing...

-start---------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash

echo "this is setrgb.sh ... wait for 40 seconds..."
sleep 40

echo "adjust RGB inputs (39=colour,38=luminance)"
/var/hack/bin/iicset 0x8Ch 0x39h 20
/var/hack/bin/iicset 0x8Ch 0x38h 21
-end------------------------------------------------

(Ignore the start/end lines of course).

The delay (sleep 40) allows the system to initialise properly before you adjust the settings.

John


----------



## Lysander

Thats sort of what I did, but instead of creating a separate file, I put those lines including the sleep 40 in the .author file.

My problem was weird. Daily calls worked fine over NTL until Sunday. If I had this script in place the NTL proxies fix caused a system hang on reboot.

By removing this script, getting the daily call to work and then typing this at the bash prompt everything is working. Not sure the wife will appreciate my final test of putting the script back in and rebooting... Corrie is on tonight!


----------



## technograndad

> _Originally posted by Lysander _
> *Thats sort of what I did, but instead of creating a separate file, I put those lines including the sleep 40 in the .author file.
> *


That would just hold up the initialisation. By making a call to an external script (containing the delay) it allows rc.sysinit (and author) to complete, meanwhile the setrgb bides its time until its safe to run the adjustments.

You can tell it's worked properly by examining /var/log/kernel - the diags from setrgb.sh should then be the last entries.

John


----------



## Lysander

aahhh....

Understand.

I sense a Corrie interruption coming! *lol* Thanks


----------



## TiVoMango

This thread is great


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *Originally posted by xxxx
> I'll give that br a try and report back.
> 
> 7 836 000 looks lovely on the TV screen but the MPEG in IFOEdit is full of glitches and dropped frames. Shame.
> 
> So far only 5 960 000 works well in MPEG for me. *


I think you should try a different way of getting the MPEGs, as I'm fine. Maybe we should contine this part in Another Place!


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by Modan _
> *Any chance of a res 0 to res 4 comparison (or does it not show up any difference on your screen-grabber?) *


I posted a Best image further up the thread. The pictures are stills from the actual MPEG, not videograbbed.


----------



## TiVoMango

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I posted a Best image further up the thread. The pictures are stills from the actual MPEG, not videograbbed. *


And it took him bl**dy ages to sort them out and post them I can tell you.


----------



## Modan

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I posted a Best image further up the thread. The pictures are stills from the actual MPEG, not videograbbed. *


OK, I'll let you off this time. I can't wait to get back to my TiVo (have been in the states for the last 7 months), and apply these settings.

Of course I'll have around 180 hours of TV to catch up with first


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by Lysander _
*I have also applied the output fix to lower the colours to the same as that on Aux, LJ's patch doesn't do this for me either. Click on the link in my signature, although I just applied the changes at the bash prompt, because putting them in the .author file caused lock up problems for me.*

Interesting thread. Thanks. Is it possible to edit the fpga file directly in any way? 
It does what it does just fine for me, but what it does isn't quite enough for my Tivo! I don't trust myself to poke registers from the command prompt.


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by sanderton _
*I think you should try a different way ...... *

I tried to PM you about this but your mailbox is full.


----------



## xxxx

Glitch problem solved with latest version of jdiner's software.

All working well on 7 836 000.

All I need now is a way of changing the settings in the fpga file.


----------



## sanderton

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *Originally posted by sanderton
> I think you should try a different way ......
> 
> I tried to PM you about this but your mailbox is full. *


Didn't knoiw there was a limit on mailboxes!

Freed up some space now.


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *Originally posted by Lysander
> I have also applied the output fix to lower the colours to the same as that on Aux, LJ's patch doesn't do this for me either. Click on the link in my signature, although I just applied the changes at the bash prompt, because putting them in the .author file caused lock up problems for me.
> 
> Interesting thread. Thanks. Is it possible to edit the fpga file directly in any way?
> It does what it does just fine for me, but what it does isn't quite enough for my Tivo! I don't trust myself to poke registers from the command prompt. *


Poke away. The values are not stored anywhere and the worst you'll do is blow up your TV if you feed it out of spec syncs 

... But of course, that hardly ever happens.

What you are editing is nothing to do with the FPGA - It's actually the configuration registers in the 7118 (input) and 7129 (output). Which are initially set in the kernel modules. LJ's patch changes the values in one of these modules, however, it needs a little bit of experimentation at the moment to find which values are active, then make an editor. I'll probably be posting something (not an editor, just information to make an editor) soon.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## 10203

8000000 was just a number I pulled out of the air - roughly 5960000 * 720 / 544  I've not seen the glitches other people have reported. Maybe it's something to do with VBR - I left DBSBestVBRBitrate as 5960000...

The disadvantage of changing the module is that you need to reboot to make the changes take effect.


----------



## Milhouse

I'm getting the white flashes on every MAX bit rate suggested so far, both with and without VBR. I'm even getting the white flashes with Min/Max rates of 5960000 (the original defaults).

I have analogue cable (and am changing the CATV settings) with an RF feed to the TiVo - perhaps resolution zero with an RF feed is the reason for the flashes, as bitrate seems to make no difference.

Going to try resolution 4 at min/max 5960000 as the default for CATV is resolution 2 so I may still be able to get some benefit from this thread!


----------



## Milhouse

It's only been a few minutes but res 4 @ min/max 5960000 looks good for CATV with RF feed - by now I'd have had maybe half a dozen flashes with res 0.

Picture quality is improved - woohoo!  Am I likely to get any further improvements to picture quality by increasing bit rate?

Maybe one day Telewaste will have the money to upgrade the analogue cable in my street. And while I'm dreaming, maybe someone will release a Series II TiVo in the UK


----------



## 10203

It's worth a try - not sure what resolution analog cable is broadcast in. In theory all you've got to lose is recording capacity


----------



## Milhouse

I've upped the max bit rate for CATV to 7836000 (min at 5960000) and still no flashes with resolution 4 - with different min/max VBR has kick in so the extra bitrate should only used when necessary, and with 240Gb of storage I can spare the megabytes!  Not sure there's any significant improvement, but I haven't noticed any picture break up when watching the Premiership (fast camera pans etc.)

Resolution 4 is definately an improvement over res 2 - previously vertical lines in the corners of the picture tended to bend inwards slightly. Now, they're perfectly straight!


----------



## Modan

Quick question. Are the people who are seeing flashes the same people as have used LJs patch?

Just wondering, as when playing around with this before, I had no bad effects at all. Basically I set it to mode 0 (looks much better IMHO, and the green doesn't show on my telly for whatever reason).

I then set all the Bitrates to something huge (working up in small steps of course), I think maybe 16M ie double what you are all using, without seeing any ill effects. I think I had to put it down a bit in the end due to an increase in artefacts during quick moving scenes (football mainly), and settled on something like 12M I think.

I'm wondering why I seem to have got so lucky compared to others here.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *Set res 0 to 7500000 7500000 and found that Tivo would no longer reboot properly, just sat there after the usual messages with a black screen, no visible response from the remote. Pulling the power lead didn't help either. Don't really know why this happened because I changed the settings for medium and this is never used unless I explicitly tell it to. Fortunately I was still able to telnet in so I put the old fpga7114.o back and all is well again, phew! *


I think that the reboot failure was due to calling technograndads's setrgb.sh from my rc.sysinit.author file and having typed reboot when it was NOT in standby mode. I've since used higher bitrates than 7.5M with LJ's patch with no problem if Tivo is in standby mode. Depending on what the tivo is doing, calling the iicset commands can upset it.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by Modan _
> *Quick question. Are the people who are seeing flashes the same people as have used LJs patch?
> 
> Just wondering, as when playing around with this before, I had no bad effects at all. Basically I set it to mode 0 (looks much better IMHO, and the green doesn't show on my telly for whatever reason).
> 
> I then set all the Bitrates to something huge (working up in small steps of course), I think maybe 16M ie double what you are all using, without seeing any ill effects. I think I had to put it down a bit in the end due to an increase in artefacts during quick moving scenes (football mainly), and settled on something like 12M I think.
> 
> I'm wondering why I seem to have got so lucky compared to others here. *


Are you sure that you were using 16M ? (the chip is only supposed to be good for 15).

What settings have you got (VBR, MAX, resolution, save disk space ?).

If you're on res 0 without LJ's patch then you're losing some picture (try switching between aux and live to see how much).

I did all of my tinkering with LJ's patch and resetting the medium settings rather than best (my default). No matter what settings I used, the picture on medium was always worse than on best, even at higher bitrates (before picture break up), even at the same resolution. I've since changed the settings on Best quality instead and I believe I'm getting the best picture yet (at the standard 5.96M, 5.96M bitrate) and don't appear to have any noticeable artefacts.
It seems that there maybe something hard coded that lowers the quality of medium compared to Best (perhaps the quality settings are ignored, even though I changed them).

I think that a more comprehensive test is required...


----------



## Milhouse

> _Originally posted by Modan _
> *Quick question. Are the people who are seeing flashes the same people as have used LJs patch?
> *


Yes, I'm using LJ's patch, and to test your theory I repleaced the original file and applied res 0/min=5.96M/max=7.83M and _still_ had flashes.

I'm applying my changes to CATVBest, and I'm using an RF feed - is anybody getting flashes with DBS and/or SCART? Perhaps it's only flashing on RF due to the reduced quality feed?


----------



## Modan

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *Are you sure that you were using 16M ? (the chip is only supposed to be good for 15).
> 
> What settings have you got (VBR, MAX, resolution, save disk space ?).
> 
> If you're on res 0 without LJ's patch then you're losing some picture (try switching between aux and live to see how much).
> 
> *


OK, so it was probably 15 then, as at the time I did look into what the max rating for the chip was. I had everything set to 15M and save disk space to off.

Yeah, I figured I was losing some picture, but I felt the advantages were worth it.

I will definitely be using LJs patch as soon as I get back to my TiVo.


----------



## Modan

> _Originally posted by Milhouse _
> *Yes, I'm using LJ's patch, and to test your theory I repleaced the original file and applied res 0/min=5.96M/max=7.83M and still had flashes.
> 
> I'm applying my changes to CATVBest, and I'm using an RF feed - is anybody getting flashes with DBS and/or SCART? Perhaps it's only flashing on RF due to the reduced quality feed? *


I for one have only tried this over SCART.


----------



## Lysander

Could it be that the flashes are not to do with the chipset, but are due to the write capabilities of the hard disks?

I don't get a higher frequency of white flashes at 12M than I do at 8, which makes me think that this is a write issue.

BTW, when watching Live TV at 7.8M I got white flashes... now back at 5.8M  

James


----------



## Milhouse

I'm confused - if this were a HD write issue wouldn't you expect flashes to become more common as the bit rate is increased?

I did wonder if the HDs could be the bottleneck with increased bitrate but the fact that flashes occur for me even at the default 5.96M min/max bitrate with resolution 0 indicates this probably isn't a HD issue, as resolution 4 at 5.96M/7.8M is perfect (ie. no flashes).

For reference, I'm using two 120Gb Seagate Baracuda V 7200.7 disks. 

Lysander - I see you're on NTL Digital. Does this mean you're using the DBS settings with SCART input? I'm on CATV/RF and suspect this to be the reason (though not sure why, reduced quality input perhaps).


----------



## xxxx

I thought that changing from 7 836 000 back to 5 960 000 on res 0 had cured my white flash problem but having looked at some new recordings I can see that it is still there, though reduced I think. It seems to happen mostly on bright or high contrast images like outdoor video and rarely on film.

When I have time I shall experiment a bit. After all, there are only three variables : the bitrate, the resolution and the patched fpga file.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *I thought that changing from 7 836 000 back to 5 960 000 on res 0 had cured my white flash problem but having looked at some new recordings I can see that it is still there, though reduced I think. It seems to happen mostly on bright or high contrast images like outdoor video and rarely on film.
> 
> When I have time I shall experiment a bit. After all, there are only three variables : the bitrate, the resolution and the patched fpga file. *


I thought the same until last night:

scrapheap challenge (1 flash)
rolf harris art program (lots of flashes)

Re: experiment, I make it at least 7 variables:

resolution (0, 1, 2, 4)
quality value (0-100)
quality setting (basic-best)
save disk space option
max bitrate
vbr bitrate
fpga file


----------



## sanderton

Pretty sure that Quality Value is just a numeric shorthand for the Quality setting and chnages nothing of itself. Certainly, the numeric value is used to store the setting in the database.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *Pretty sure that Quality Value is just a numeric shorthand for the Quality setting and chnages nothing of itself. Certainly, the numeric value is used to store the setting in the database. *


I suspected that when I changed the basic quality to 100 and it recorded as best instead.

OK, only 6 variables then.


----------



## Lysander

I am using Scart and have changed the DBS settings.

I am not using save disk space, and have VBR and Max at the same values.

In fact, the only change I now have in place is the fpga file. Still get some "glitching".

Looks like we aren't quite there yet.

Back to Res 4 for a while...

James


----------



## Dibblah

Righty ho. Here we go... This is just a list of the registers in the 7118 in easy-to-parse text format.

It's the basis of what the editor will work from.


----------



## Dibblah

... And the list of addresses of the tables in the fpga7114.o file.

The first item in the table is the number of bytes of data in the table +1 (!?)

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## Modan

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *I thought the same until last night:
> 
> scrapheap challenge (1 flash)
> rolf harris art program (lots of flashes)
> 
> Re: experiment, I make it at least 7 variables:
> 
> resolution (0, 1, 2, 4)
> quality value (0-100)
> quality setting (basic-best)
> save disk space option
> max bitrate
> vbr bitrate
> fpga file *


To be honest, I think you can cut it down to the following without too much fear of missing anything

fpga file
max bitrate + resolution
is vbr on
program source

seems like Millhouse has eliminated the fpga
Millhouse also sees it with and without VBR
program source has been eliminated by Lysander

So sounds like it is a combination of higher bitrates and higher res. So sounds like maxing out some part of the graphics subsystem. Perhaps this is why we see different people getting different effects, since there may be different chip revisions? and certainly my TiVo runs significantly cooler than the norm (by maybe as much as 5 degrees), so chip overheating may be a problem.


----------



## xxxx

I put my Tivo back onto res 4 to see whether the white glitches would go away and discovered that it is the res setting that is responsible for my blue shift problem, not the fpga file. Res 0 or res 1 = no blue shift. Res 4 = blue shift. Bitrate has no effect on this.

Has anyone noticed any particular programme that always displays the white glitches? It would be nice to find something like an intro to a regular programme that does it, for testing.


----------



## Dibblah

For me, I've seen it in res 4 on Andromeda. Title sequences (White text scrolling on a black background) are worst. Note: This is BEFORE any hacking about. It's not consistent - It won't do it all the time. I'm also wondering if drive speed has anything to do with it - I still have the original Quantum (Slow as a slow thing on the go-slow pills) drive in, with a 120Gb slave.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by Dibblah _
> *... And the list of addresses of the tables in the fpga7114.o file.
> 
> The first item in the table is the number of bytes of data in the table +1 (!?)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Allan. *


Downloaded 18 times?!?!? My, we have some (in) : (a)quisitive beavers here!

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## ruperte

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *Has anyone noticed any particular programme that always displays the white glitches? It would be nice to find something like an intro to a regular programme that does it, for testing. *


Just as a reference point, I have NTL and if I record any of the radio channels, the NTL decoder displays a spinning "Audio" logo. This seems to upset the encoder in the same way.

Normally I record radio at Basic quality and that will give a white flash once per revolution. Note this has been true ever since 2.5.5 came along.

Rupert


----------



## occitan

How is this going now after a week or so's experiments ? Are you guys happy with the new high resolution, or have you all gone back to the TiVo defaults ?

Cheers


----------



## 10203

Working fine here. Haven't had time to play with the colour/brightness/etc settings yet.


----------



## xxxx

It's OK for me apart from the white glitches and they seem to be entirely to do with the res 0 setting. Nothing I change in the bitrates seems to make the glitches go away. For me they seem to only appear on hand-held video source material (ie flaky sources), never on film. I use the res on 0 and left the bitrate on the original default setting as I can't really see the difference. I only really want the res 0 setting for the 720x576 resolution and the fact that only the res 0 setting gets rid of my blue shift problem which presumably is a fault on my Tivo.

I would like to reduce the contrast and brightness more though as my Tivo is clearly set at much higher levels than other people's Tivos are. Or perhaps it's all part of the same fault?


----------



## Dapper Dan

Mine was working fine. Still got occasional white flashes but nothing too distracting. Disks appear to have failed now, only been in there a month.


----------



## technograndad

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *Mine was working fine. Still got occasional white flashes but nothing too distracting. Disks appear to have failed now, only been in there a month.  *


Are those Samsungs? Both failed? That's a worry...

John


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
* Disks appear to have failed now, only been in there a month.  *

What brand/model are they?


----------



## Dapper Dan

They're the Samsung spinpoint SV1204H.

I only said they've appeared to fail, in that Tivo refuses to boot (don't even get any messages, just a grey screen). I've pulled them out and they seem ok in the quick test in HUTIL so I figured I'd have a look at the logs and maybe copy some files off the old 40gb disk if anything looked wrong (fpga7114.o, etc). However, I don't seem to be able to mount them when using the mfstools2 cd or the nic_install cd. Mind you, this happened when I first ran mfstools on them, that ran fine but I couldn't mount them. Same cds and pc worked fine with my old 120GB maxtor so I'm a bit confused (might try downgrading the bios to see if that helps). I also have redhat 9 on one partition so tried booting into that, but that wouldn't mount them either (think that you might need mac partition support, might have to rebuild kernel).

Any ideas ?

PS - When I ran HUTIL, the smart diagnostics said that one disc had been running for 650 hours (about right), but the other had been running for 1476 hours.


----------



## iankb

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *... one disc had been running for 650 hours (about right), but the other had been running for 1476 hours. *


Check the manufacturing dates printed on the drives to see if they (roughly) match. I assume that the Samsung website has the ability to check the warranty date for each serial number. Check those to make sure that you were definitely sold new drives.

As to the drive problems, you could try a new IDE cable. Also check that there are no bents pins on the drives.

Ian.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by iankb _
> *Check the manufacturing dates printed on the drives to see if they (roughly) match. I assume that the Samsung website has the ability to check the warranty date for each serial number. Check those to make sure that you were definitely sold new drives.
> 
> As to the drive problems, you could try a new IDE cable. Also check that there are no bents pins on the drives.
> 
> Ian. *


Pins are fine, dates are the same (03.2003), boxes looked original and new. Haven't tried a new cable, but the old one is running fine with the original disk. Have also wondered if it just fell over because it got so full (>80%). I'd also used the -r 4 option when I created it, and whatever the option was to make enough swap.


----------



## iankb

My drives are almost permanently 100% full, but then I rarely use KUID. If you mean that you uses KUID on up to 80% of the drives, then maybe that might cause a problem.

I used the '-r 4' option, and my drives failed completely when I created an advanced wishlist. Since then, I have avoided both the '-r 4' option and advanced wishlists. Probably just a coincidence in both cases, but I've been running reliably since.

Ian.


----------



## Dapper Dan

The % of KUIDs is pretty small I think, and I have no advanced wishlists. Don't have time to investigate any further until next week.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
> *Mine was working fine. Still got occasional white flashes but nothing too distracting. Disks appear to have failed now, only been in there a month.  *


After a bit of a saga I have finally got it working again 

It seems that calling iicset in setrgb.sh from rc.sysinit.author might not be such a good idea. The kernel log had an I2C transaction timeout which stops it from booting properly and you end up with a blank screen (but can still get a bash prompt). When this happens, I normally copy my backup of rc.sysinit.author (that does nothing) over the top of the version that calls setrgb.sh. Unfortunately, in this case I copied it over the top of rc.sysinit instead, which means that it doesn't boot and you don't get a bash prompt. That meant I had to hoik out the disks with the hope of mounting them via the mfstools2 cd and seeing if I could see what had gone wrong. Unfortunately, there seems to be a problem with this CD related to byte swapping which means that it won't mount the disk. I managed to get it working, however, by typing:

vmlnodma hda=bswap initrd=initrd.img load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0

Then I could mount the required partition with a:

mkdir /mnt/var4
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda4 /mnt/var4

and finally work out what I'd done wrong.


----------



## 10203

*in this case I copied it over the top of rc.sysinit instead*

Don't you just hate it when that happens 

Forgetting chmod +x is my favourite...


----------



## Roj

> _Originally posted by mrtickle _
> *I also changed the live buffer to Medium*


How do you do this? I thought it might be the defaultrecordquality / defaultliverecordquality settings (e.g. change them to 40 for medium), but that doesn't seem to do it for me?

Thanks,
Roj


----------



## technograndad

You just need to change the menu option under Settings, Video Quality (or something like that). Whatever you're preferred default recording quality will also be the live buffer quality setting.


----------



## ktbken

As far as I know the live buffer always records in best regardless of the settings for recording quality.
As an example my system is set to high as the default setting. But if I choose to record a program which has started I get a popup saying do I wish to record from the beginning of the buffer at best or start from now and record at high.


----------



## mas

yes, live buffer is always Best unless recording something - which will be at specified or default quality setting


----------



## tivo_boj

I tried reading through this but have lost the plot a bit

I note on LJs page on what I need to set to a 0 setting, but what are the actual bitrate etc I need to set via tivoweb.


I want to increase the live buffer to best possible (better than it is now) and also the "best setting" to better.

an idiots guide may help others as well as me!

Also was ther conclusiont have you could not harm tivo buy increasing any of the settings?


----------



## xxxx

The "0" setting changes the Tivo resolution. If you do this you'll need to change the file as mentioned earlier in this thread as otherwise you'll have some nasty side-effects. There was quite a bit of discussion about the bitrate settings and the white glitch that goes with the change to res "0". You'll need to suck it and see what works for you.

I have gone to res "0", with the file change, main bitrate settings of max 7836000 and VBR 5960000, and I have put the quality down to 75% which seems to reduce the white glitches and gives me surprisingly small file sizes of about 2Gb per hour. I haven't touched the AltBitrate settings and still don't know what they do, if anything.

All in all I am quite happy though I would like to get rid of the remaining few white glitches and would also like to make further reductions to the contrast, brightness and colour, all of which are still way over the top on my Tivo.


----------



## Dapper Dan

> _Originally posted by xxxx _
> *...would also like to make further reductions to the contrast, brightness and colour, all of which are still way over the top on my Tivo. *


Have you tried running iicset; this changes the luminance and colour on playback, I think, or are you trying to change it on input ?


----------



## Lysander

xxxx,

check out the link in my sig.

This gives you a very good colour and brightness match.

James


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by Dapper Dan _
*Have you tried running iicset; *

No, I hadn't heard of that one.

*this changes the luminance and colour on playback, I think, or are you trying to change it on input ? *

I'm hoping to change the input settings as it seems neater. The existing fpga7114.o mod does a fair enough job but I would like to tweak it a bit more: my Tivo's settings seem to be further off than most.


----------



## xxxx

_Originally posted by Lysander _
*check out the link in my sig.
This gives you a very good colour and brightness match.*

Thanks for that link. It seems to be what Dapper Dan was referring to also.

I'm hoping for a solution along the lines of the existing fpga7114.o mod as it seems to be very effective and nicely permanent without putting any load on the Tivo processor. I suspect that a Windows editor for that file would allow for quite a few interesting adjustments.


----------



## Lysander

The mod changes the output settings, is a one off change and doesn't add any load to the Tivo, apart from the extra line in rc.sysinit.author of course...

James


----------



## xxxx

Hmm. I'll give it a try. The input modifcation would be nice though.

Can the fpga7114.o file be safely edited with a Windows XP hex editor or are there any special Linux issues to watch out for?


----------



## stevelup

Hi

I'm having a bit of trouble with the resource editor.

I change the resolutions and bitrates, click update resources, then reboot as requested.

Every time TiVo comes back up, the settings are back how they were!

Help!

Thanks,

Steve


----------



## Dibblah

Change one of the values. Press 'Enter'. Then change another. Press 'Enter'. Then update resources and reboot.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## stevelup

Thanks!

Wasn't pressing enter! What a wally.

Much appreciated.


Steve


----------



## technograndad

You have to press Enter each time you type in a new value. Then at the end you click on Update Resources and reboot. 

John

Edit: Oops.. shouldn't have gone to make a coffee before replying


----------



## stevelup

Hi

Just a word of thanks to all the people who have contributed on this thread.

I have my TiVo connected to a Sanyo PLV-Z1 projector and the images from TiVo were always a bit disagreeable.

If there was something on TV that we really wanted to watch on the PJ, we would watch it live using Aux Bypass.

With the new high resolution mode and increased bitrate, the picture from the projector is an order of magnitude better than it was.

You *can* see the difference it makes on the TV, but the projector really shows up the difference.

I would strongly recommend that anyone who uses their TiVo with a projector should do the hacks on this thread.

I am using 7680000 for the bitrate BTW, and have seen no white flashes as reported by others.


Cheers!

Steve


----------



## Craig B

I have read the posts over a series of weeks and would like to give it a go. Could anyone give an idiots guide on how to do it and best settings? 

I have Tivoweb, a 120Gb drive and will be outputting to a 42 inch plasma. I have already broken one Tivo upgrading and wouldn't like to face the girlfriends wrath if I did it again. Thanks


----------



## Lysander

Follow LJ's instructions here:

http://www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/tivo_fpga.html

Then follow TechnoGrandad's instructions here:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?postid=1401427#post1401427

Reboot and away you go.

James


----------



## Craig B

I'm trying to download LJ's fpga patch but his website is down. I have found a cached copy of his instructions but not the file. Could somebody please point me in the right direction. Thanks


----------



## Craig B

Don't worry about the previous request, it's back up now.


----------



## tivo_boj

Sttll having problems getting the tivo to record in VBR - see thread

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=138483


----------



## sanderton

I just did this:

In TiVoWeb's resource editor, the Bitrate page, changed CATVHighMAXBitrate to 5960000 (I use FreeView on that TiVo, so the CATV variables are the relevant ones). Hit return. Updated Resources. Turned Save Disk Space on. Rebooted. Recorded something on High and this was the tvlog entry:


Code:


Oct 25 11:38:52 (none) TmkMediaswitch::Trace[149]: using VBR, bitRate=3660000, maxBitRate=5960000


----------



## tivo_boj

I use sky on scart, freeview on RF. Which should i changes for each? is the CATV the scart input? and rooftop RF?,

what do the DBS ones mean, as I have been altering these?


----------



## sanderton

If you look in Channels I Receive you'll see the input source in brackets by each channel number.

My guess is that:

sat = DBS
cab = CATV
aer = Rooftop


----------



## tivo_boj

All comes clear now why I only got the odd VBR recording.

Thanks for the info

(endpad rules OK)


----------



## tivo_boj

found that Tivo seems to report the wrong quality on recording now I have changed the bitrates to force VBR

For instance see below from tivoweb - this is a suggestion which should have recorded at basic (altered for VBR) but shows as best. However looking at the size it unlikely it was recorded at best .....any ideas

*Duration 0:27 * 
Original Air Date Sat 1st Nov 2003 
Actors Keri Russell, Scott Speedman, Amy Jo Johnson, Tangi Miller, Greg Grunberg, Amanda Foreman, Scott Foley 
Guest Stars Tyra Banks 
Directors Keith Samples 
Exec Producers Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Tony Krantz, J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves 
Writers John Eisendrath 
Genres Drama 
Bits Stereo, Sub 
Type Series 
Channel 6 ITV2 
Showing Date Sat 1st Nov 03:40 
Expiration Date Wed 5th Nov 18:00 
Deletion Date 
Cancel Date 
Cancel Reason 
*Quality Best *
Score Predicted 1 80 
Selection Type Suggestion 
State Now Playing 
*Size 344 MB *


----------



## sanderton

When you turn on Save Disk Space (VBR) it says on that screen that VBR doesn't work with Basic.


----------



## tivo_boj

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *When you turn on Save Disk Space (VBR) it says on that screen that VBR doesn't work with Basic. *


but it shows "best" - should it not just say basic even if it recorded at CBR (although the log says VBR)


----------



## sanderton

Check the TiVoWeb code, perhaps it assumes Best when Quality is not specified? (Default recordings have no Quality entry in the db)


----------



## tivo_boj

This could be it cause as other vbr recording done at high or medium also show as best (although they show OK on Tivo itself)


----------



## kitschcamp

> _Originally posted by sanderton _
> *I just did this:
> 
> In TiVoWeb's resource editor, the Bitrate page, changed CATVHighMAXBitrate to 5960000 (I use FreeView on that TiVo, so the CATV variables are the relevant ones). Hit return. Updated Resources. Turned Save Disk Space on. Rebooted. Recorded something on High and this was the tvlog entry:
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> 
> Oct 25 11:38:52 (none) TmkMediaswitch::Trace[149]: using VBR, bitRate=3660000, maxBitRate=5960000
> 
> *


I've just been experimenting altering the Basic settings for DBS.

DBSBasicVBRBitrate 2760000 (standard medium)
DBSBasicMAXBitrate 3660000 (standard high)
DBSBasicResolution 2 (standard high)

And recorded two 35 mins programs on the same channel us

Programme 1: Gardening, lots of grass & trees. 729088Kb
Programme 2: Houses. 708608Kb.

Normal High: 955392Kb
Normal medium: 724764Kb

I expected the values to be somewhere between the two. Seems in some cases it can be somewhat lower.


----------



## SteveWilkins

Excellent work guys. This thread was one of the deciding factors for me finally opening up my TiVo and starting hacking, that and the warranty has now expired.

I have just completed hacking my TiVo (New Drives and TurboNet) and have been following the instructions on this thread to improve the record quality of my TiVo.

However, I am unable to find a binary of Tridge's iicset utility. His web site only has the source file. So I thought, all I need is the Cross compiler and I'll compile it. No such luck. I am unable to run gcc. I just get an error "1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected". This is even if I just run it with no parameters, not even and input file. I am slightly cheating by attempting to run gcc under Cygwin on WinXP, as I don't have linux on my PC.

Does anyone have the binary of iicset or can someone advise me on what I am doing wrong with the cross compiler. The latter would also be useful as I would like to be able to build my own binaries, being a programmer myself.


----------



## 10203

There's one hiding in the zip that's not a zip here


----------



## mrtickle

> _Originally posted by Roj _
> 
> Originally posted by mrtickle
> I also changed the live buffer to Medium
> 
> *How do you do this? I thought it might be the defaultrecordquality / defaultliverecordquality settings (e.g. change them to 40 for medium), but that doesn't seem to do it for me?
> 
> Thanks,
> Roj *


In the Resources editor in TiVoweb, it was the 4th down from the top - "DefaultLiveRecordQuality". change it to 75/40/0 for a High/Medium/Basic Live buffer.

I wanted to experiment with different numbers, after reading the posts from the US forums. But tivoweb has so many instances of 100/75/40/0 hard-coded into it it was too much hassle.

The white flashes and how to predict where they will appear: I have seen them on my (standard bit rates) tivo without fail every week on the end titles of (a) The Office, (b) 24. These programmes both had action immediately followed by a mostly-black screen. HTH!


----------



## SteveWilkins

I found that the glitches at the bottom of the screen seem to vary depending upon what is being recorded. The worst I have seen was on Parkinson on BBC1 on Saturday. The glitches were happening constantly every few seconds. I have the bit-rate increased to 7.8Mbps. I also tried switching VBR on and off, and found it didn't make any difference. I switched over to ITV1, and there were no glitches to be seen.  

MrTickle, is your standard bit-rate Tivo running in Mode 0 when you get the white flashes?

Anyone got any theory about what is causing the glitches and how to stop them. Going back to Mode 4 is not an option as I love my Tivo even more now the picture quality is so good I cannot tell the difference between Aux and "Live TV". But then I'm a fussy git with a 36" TV. 

And being in a native DVD resolution has other advantages  

I'd just like to fix the slight vertical offset and my Tivo would be sheer perfection.


----------



## mrtickle

> _Originally posted by SteveWilkins _
> *
> MrTickle, is your standard bit-rate Tivo running in Mode 0 when you get the white flashes?
> *


Nope, this was bog-standard "Best" quality.


----------



## xxxx

I am starting to think that the white glitches are to do with the ambient video noise level and/or mpeg artefacts present in the source. On my sat-only system it seems to affect BBC channels the most (almost exclusively in fact) and these are often said to have relatively low bit rates compared to the other FTV channels. They also tend to use domestic hand-held cameras that they say are "broadcast quality" but which often give a very grainy result.
I must do some testing with the nastier low bit rate shopping channels.


----------



## Fozzie

Finally got round to having a dabble with this. Although I have NTL digital cable I was expecting the DBS resources to apply but they don't - it's the CATV ones. I was surprised to find the Best Resolution mode set to 2 - I was expecting it to be 4!

I installed LJs mod'd fpga file and set Best mode to 0 and changed the max bitrate to 8000000. Rebooted and wow, what a difference 

None of the reported problems reported so far. Best capacity has dropped from 68hrs to 50hrs which is fine as I only use it for LiveTV and sports recordings.


----------



## iankb

If you're using VBR, the capacity reported by the TiVo will be incorrectly calculated using the Max Bitrate. In fact, the true capacity should be based on the Average BitRate, which should give you significantly more. Using bobone's settings increased my resolution, but decreased my filesizes by 40-50%.


----------



## Fozzie

I've got VBR off but since I've increased the max resolution by ~30% the drop in recording time seemed about right.

I don't suppose you (or anyone) know how to derive the values used in the Tivoweb info.itcl module to calculate the recording capacity? Best still shows 68hrs as it doesn't 'know' that I've increased the bit rate!


----------



## mark.stringer

After much research over the last week (here and on the other place) I have changed the medium quality settings on my Tivo to use resolution 0 with a bitrate of 7660000 and quality set to 70%. I installed LJs mod but not the iicset changes.
I tried a short recording and all seems fine and this has solved a separate problem I had with viewing on other equipment.
A few questions:
1. Do these settings seem reasonable? The output seems fine viewing by either method.
2. The amount of disk used seems about the same as best. Should I be using a quality setting of 100% rather than 70? Presumably this will cost me more disk space.
3. Should I be using VBR and if so what settings would you recommend?
4. Do I need to make the iicset changes given all looks fine and, if so, where do I get iicset as I could only find iicset.c sourcecode and no compiled version?
After some more reading, to answer my own question about the binary see here:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?postid=1512699#post1512699

I have searched quite extensively for answers to the above here and other there but there is a glut of information on this topic with no good summaries that I can find, or at least no good UK summaries. Don't get me wrong, the info in this thread is great but I wanted to clarify the above as well.

Thanks,
Mark.


----------



## blindlemon

The Recording Quality setting does, IMHO, make a difference.

There is a noticeable difference (although hard to pin down exactly) between a RQ setting of 75 (high) and 100 (best). If you go below about 75, then regardless of the resolution, the picture becomes less sharp and the difference between a RQ of 5 and 95 with all other factors the same is very obvious.

If you use 100 for both best and medium the TiVo UI will get confused and report your medium recordings as "best", but I would suggest you try, say 95, and see if that looks better than your recordings made at 70.

FWIW, These are the settings I am currently using:-

Best 7500000/9000000, mode 0, RQ 100
High 3660000/6000000, mode 0, RQ 75
Medium 2500000/5960000, mode 0, RQ 55
Basic 1700000/2000000, mode 1, RQ 0


----------



## mark.stringer

Thanks blindlemon,

I take it from your settings that you are allowing VBR to operate. Does this work well and help reduce overall recording size? If I transfer files to other places I would be concerned about them getting too big.

You didn't mention if you were using the iicset changes or not. Are you just using LJ's changes or those and the iicset?

Cheers,
Mark.


----------



## sanderton

VBR massively reduces filesize, but if you've implemented Res0 to improve picture quality, you may not want to take it back down again by switching on VBR.


----------



## mark.stringer

I've implemented Res0 more because of compatibility issues elsewhere, so I am looking for advice on a happy medium on the bitrate and quality settings. I am happy with the quality I was getting with Best, just not the format. From what I read I got the impression that using Res0 with the existing Best settings did not give good results.


----------



## blindlemon

The default "best" bitrate of 5960000 is good, but too low to be described as "best". You really do need the higher bitrates to avoid pixellation when running in mode 0. 

I have only tried one CBR recording in mode 0 (at 6000000, by accident!) and although it was very nice on fairly static scenes, pixellation was noticeable on scenes with significant motion or "difficult" subject matter such as water or flames. 

That's why I've set my "best" bitrates to 7500000/9000000. With these values I hardly see any pixellation at all in even the most demanding scenes, so I use this when absolute quality is required at the expense of disk space - eg. when I know I will be archiving (ahem) to DVD. 

However, my "high" settings of 3660000/6000000 are more than adequate for everyday viewing of movies etc. and I make most of my recordings on "high", with medium and basic reserved for US sitcoms and kids' stuff. 

I don't use iicset as I watch 99% of my TV through my TiVo and have adjusted the TV instead


----------



## aerialplug

Having only recently experimented with increased bitrate, I've found that using MAX 9000000 and average 4800000 on mode 0 causes the unwanted artifacts at the bottom of the screen on far too many programmes. Mostly these are programmes originally sourced on film, so there's a lot of ambient grain, but I did see it happen last night several times on Stargate (which is also sourced on film, but not at all grainy).

The artifacts seem to be replications of bits of the picture from other parts of the screen that flash at the bottom of the screen for a single frame (often repeating for a few subsequent frames in different patterns). I guess the coder can't handle the bitrate. After all, it is technology that's over 5 years old - when domestic MPEG coders were largely unheard of...

Mind you, I've seen these artifacts in all other modes, but usually only on still images such as credits or when TiVo's recording the caption that's on screen while recording radio programmes.

I'll try dropping the MAX bitrate to 8000000 to see if that alleviates the problem whilst maintaining the excellent increase in picture quality observed in Mode 0.

Incidentally, with the above settings (including the VBR), a mode 0 recording looks superb compared to best quality, so it would be good to get some sort of compromise to work where the quality is almost as good without the flashes at the bottom of the screen.

Conversely, I've changed basic quality to be 750000Kb/s. The picture quality is AWFUL to the extent that on some busy images, the coder completely fails and you get large gray areas on screen for some frames, but it's excellent for radio, with roughly 100Mb per 15 minutes.


----------



## Dunkwho

I dropped my mode 0 bit rate back to 7890000 last night from 9000000 in the hope that some of my white flashes will disappear ... and that some of my stuttering will stop (why do you stutter so Mr Tivo?). New 160gb hd so wasn't expecting to see any problems but seems to have conicided with the upgrade, I uped the res and bitrate in the same process too so am trying to wind back bitrate to see if theres any improvement. I decided to use 789k because its 1.353x596k based on mode 0 being 1.353xmode4's pixels (mode 4 IS the freeview default isn't it ... and 596k the matching default bitrate as delivered from tivo?).

Incidentally ... can anyone with a 160gb lba48 upgraded system running with 900k CBR bitrate tell me what their total best recording time is from the system page? I was surprised to see it reported as 35hrs (and something minutes) - decided it was because tivo was taking my uped bitrate into account (which i didn't think it did), the basic was shown as 185 which lined up with my expectations (I was concerned that my upgrade might have gone wrong somewhere, maybe the lba wasn't loaded correctly or the -x restore option gone wrong somewhere ...?)

Duncan


----------



## iankb

When using VBR and mode 0, the TiVo system screen appears to show calculations based upon the max bitrate rather than the average/target bitrate. This appears to reduce the number of hours from the standard settings while, in fact, it substantially increased them.


----------



## blindlemon

> _Originally posted by Dunkwho _
> *I dropped my mode 0 bit rate back to 7890000 last night from 9000000 in the hope that some of my white flashes will disappear *


 I Use 7500000/9000000 mode 0 (best) and 3660000/6000000 mode 0 (high) on both my lounge TiVos and very rarely see the white flashes in either mode.

Some people have suggested it may be down to the individual TiVo - but in that case I would expect one to be worse affected than the other and I can't say I've noticed any pattern. If I see 2 white flashes in a 2 hour film I'm surprised. 


> _Originally posted by Dunkwho _
> *can anyone with a 160gb lba48 upgraded system running with 900k CBR bitrate tell me what their total best recording time is from the system page?*


 35 hours sounds about right. A 120gb drive with a max bitrate of 9000000 for best shows 25 hours 45 minutes. The capacity multiplier for a 160gb LBA48 drive compared to 120gb is about 1.36 and 1.36 * 25.75 is, funnily enough, 35 

However, your actual capacity at best for a 160gb LBA48 drive is more likely to be around 42 hours if you use a lower bitrate of 7500000 as I have suggested.


----------



## gyre

Do any of you with VBR get lip sync problems? If so, how badly?

Thanks.

-- gyre --


----------



## sanderton

No more than I used to.


----------



## blindlemon

I have yet to prove that a lip-sync problem is the fault of VBR. You can't tell on a recording unless you have the source to compare it with. 

Whenever I've noticed lip-sync problems in a programme being recorded, or while watching Live TV I have always found the same discrepancy in the original signal. Some Sky channels are regularly abysmal.


----------



## Fozzie

Not noticed it at all on mine.


----------



## aerialplug

Well, I recorded Brirish Isles: A Natural History tonight in 7500000/9000000 mode 0. It was FAR worse than my previous recording in 4800000/9000000.

After doing a lot more experimentation, I've come to the definite conclusion that the errors that cause the flashing at the bottom of the screen are appearing in the decoding phase rather than the encoding.

One reason I've come to this conclusion is that the artefacts appear differently (but roughly in the same place) each time I play a sequence.

Another reason - you can never freeze frame on an artefact - they're like a rainbow - whenever you know where to stop - they're not there!

There are other far more conclusive proofs that illustrate this that can't be discussed here. 

Suffice to say that for some reasons, 4800000/9000000 is what I'll be using in future - but only for "special" recordings. I'll continue to experiment to see what optimum settings work for my TiVo in mode 0 for every day use.


----------



## Fozzie

I'm using 5960000/7836000 with Mode 0 for Best, on NTL cable. Rarely get white flashes at the bottom of the screen; when I do, IIRC, they are mainly on BBC1. YMMV.


----------



## gyre

I've seen the flashes appear when the source material is poor quality.

Also, it is deffo in the playback and not the recording 

-- gyre --


----------



## kitschcamp

> _Originally posted by Fozzie _
> *I'm using 5960000/7836000 with Mode 0 for Best, on NTL cable. Rarely get white flashes at the bottom of the screen; when I do, IIRC, they are mainly on BBC1. YMMV. *


I have to agree - it does predominantly affect BBC1. I've yet to see flashes when I've recorded GPs at Mode 0 on ITV, yet most things on BBC1 do.


----------



## blindlemon

> _Originally posted by aerialplug _
> *Well, I recorded Brirish Isles: A Natural History tonight in 7500000/9000000 mode 0. It was FAR worse than my previous recording in 4800000/9000000.*


 If you have another recording of exactly the same programme then that's interesting. If it's a different episode then I'm afraid it means very little.

The flashes are clearly related to the source material - I can kind of anticipate now where they'll occur. It's usually, IME, in scenes with very brigh areas to the top of the screen and very dark ones at the bottom - eg. contrasty, against the sun, landscapes etc. I saw a couple in an episode of Grand Designs Abroad ("Ireland") I was watching yesterday. Of course they weren't repeatable and not present when the recording was viewed (ahem) on a different playback device.

FWIW the recording that exhibited this on my TiVo was made at 3660000/6000000 in Mode 0 (high), and I have also seen white flashes in recordings made in Mode 0 at 2500000/5960000 (medium) - so it's not only restricted to the very high bitrates.


----------



## aerialplug

Yes, I agree that a conclusive test would be using the same source with different settings. I think I may set up a test bed using my DVD player for this - but not yet.

However, it was consistetly happening on all recordings made in that resolution combination. My guess is that I'm pushing TiVo's decoder to its limits - and the limits may be different on various TiVos. Mine is a very early TiVo from the first production run so maybe later TiVos can cope better with high bit rates? I'll try dropping the max bitrate to see if that makes any difference.


----------



## Chris T

> _Originally posted by aerialplug _
> *
> 
> My guess is that I'm pushing TiVo's decoder to its limits - and the limits may be different on various TiVos. Mine is a very early TiVo from the first production run so maybe later TiVos can cope better with high bit rates? I'll try dropping the max bitrate to see if that makes any difference. *


Thats interesting, I have original very early ex-shop demo Tivo that cant stand having its video tweaked in any way. If increase the bit rate to anything that may a useful increase then the amount of white flashes becomes intolerable.


----------



## Dunkwho

I wonder ... what 60XX models do we all have, could this be linked to how well white flashes are handled? Mine flashes more than a pervert with a new coat in mode 0 (doesn't with mode 4 even with the high bit rates I've tried) - its an older model from memory with 2 hd brackets ... a 601F

Duncan


----------



## iankb

> _Originally posted by Dunkwho _
> *I wonder ... what 60XX models do we all have, could this be linked to how well white flashes are handled?*


Think that is irrelevant. I have a 601E model, and probably notice white flashes less than once a month. However, I have a different artifact that often appears on the TiVo, though not on 'archived' recordings. That is what appears to be a single flickering 'pixel' in a fixed position on the screen; a bit like a distant star.

I think that it is just the random limits of the components, and we are using 'out-of-band' values that TiVo decided were not reliable enough for the standard configuration. If you've ever tried to overclock a PC processor, you will know that every chip has significantly-different limits. And the configured clock speed of a CPU is often determined by sampling, rather than being specifically manufactured as such.


----------



## themonk

There seems some discrepancy as to what the best bit rate values are to use to eliminate the white flashing problems. I've just done this mod as per LJ's instructions and have set both xxxBestMAXBitrate and xxxBestVBRBitrate to 8000000 and have moved what were the Best values down to the High settings. The entries for both DBS (SkyDigital) and Rooftop have been changed.
I'm intending to run these values for a couple of weeks or so to see if anything spurious appears. If everything looks okay then I might have a play with VBR.

Has anyone any conclusions as to what might be causing the white flashing? Running with VBR perhaps?


----------



## B33K34

I get some white flashes on standard 'best' settings - credits are particularly prone where theres a lot of black with fine white text. It must just be where the capabilities of the MPEG encoder are exceeded.


----------



## gyre

Might it be the decoder, rather than the encoder?

-- gyre --


----------



## iankb

It is the decoder. The files on disk do not include the white flashes; or so I'm told.


----------



## Dunkwho

My experience ... flashing is brought on by moving to mode 0. I don't recall ever seeing it before I started with my res\bitrate changes - not to say it wasn't there just that it'd have been so infrequent as for me to ignore it\put it down to the broadcast. I'm heading back to mode 4 with uped bit rate from my current mode 0 uped bit rate config ... last time I did this I didn't see any flashing (boo hoo, would like mode 0 for the projector  ).

Duncan


----------



## B33K34

OT slightly but indulge me. IIRC Tivo either drops or raises the picture. i corrected this by adjusting the scan on the TV (I rarely use any other source so would rather have Tivo 'right'). I think the flashes tend to be at the extreme bottom of the screen - maybe Tivo's picture was dropped on purpose to hide these and my fiddling revealed them?

They reappear when the coding chip is pushed harder. i still havent got around to fiddling with the bit rates themselves


----------



## aerialplug

> _Originally posted by Dunkwho _
> *My experience ... flashing is brought on by moving to mode 0. I don't recall ever seeing it before I started with my res\bitrate changes - not to say it wasn't there just that it'd have been so infrequent as for me to ignore it\put it down to the broadcast. I'm heading back to mode 4 with uped bit rate from my current mode 0 uped bit rate config ... last time I did this I didn't see any flashing (boo hoo, would like mode 0 for the projector  ).
> *


I'm afraid I've had to come to the same conclusion. My TiVo just doesn't "do" mode 0. I've tried a variety of bit rates - all cause the flashing at the bottom of the screen. I suppose some chips can cope with mode 0 and others can't swhich kind of explains why some here have no problems and others like myself can't get rid of the white flashes (on all recordings).

I guess TiVo knew what they were doing when they elected not to use the mode.

Hmm... as I was typing this, I've just realised that my mode 0 recording has a quality setting of 75, not 100. I wonder if this'll make any difference? More experimenting tonight I think...


----------



## Nevets

After a long hesitation (life's not worth living if I screw up our only beloved Tivo) I finally changed my "medium" quality settings to 6000000/8000000, mode 0. After rebooting, my test recording showed as CBR 8000000 in the TVLog (as expected, since I hadn't enabled the "save disk space" option).

Then I decided to go the extra step to enable VBR, and upped the quality to 80 (RecordQualityMedium in the resource editor - I assume that's the correct setting). After rebooting, any recordings I schedule for medium quality now record as basic (i.e. CBR, bitRate=1700000), but show up in Tivoweb's Now Showing as "Medium". I don't know what they look like on Tivo, as I'm at work.

The settings I have changed so far (I only have analogue rooftop aerial) are:
RecordQualityMedium = 80
RooftopMediumVBRBitrate = 6000000
RooftopMediumMAXBitrate = 8000000
RooftopMediumResolution = 0
Everything else has been left at default.

Has anyone got any idea what I've done wrong?


----------



## blindlemon

You need to hack *ui.itcl* to change all the places where it refers to "40", meaning "medium", to "80" instead. There are about 4 occurences you have to change.

TivoWeb uses hardcoded lookups on the default RQ numbers assigned to each quality to infer which quality is which. I suspect that what's happening is that when you try to schedule a "medium" recording it's looking for a quality that matches your RQ of 80. When it doesn't find it, the code drops through to the default quality, which is "basic" and uses that instead.

If you schedule the recordings from the TiVo UI when you get home you will find that they come out as medium with your expected resolution and bitrates. You will, however, have to reset any SPs or autorecord wishlists that were set to record in "medium" to "medium" again - as the same thing will have happened to them and they will now be showing as "basic".

An alternative to all the above would be to change "best" or "high" to use mode 0 and higher bitrates instead - as both these have a RQ setting >= 75 (which is where the quality changes from fuzzy to clear in mode 0). You would not then need to change the RQ for that mode, and would not confuse TiVoWeb or the TiVo UI.


----------



## Nevets

Thanks Blindlemon... you were spot-on.

I've changed the RQ back to 40 and it's behaving itself now. I will change "best" when I'm happy that everything works ok, but for now I've got another problem...

I have a green vertical bar on the right-hand side of the picture from ALL types of output (nudge nudge). I haven't applied LJ's fpga mod yet, but am I right in assuming that it only affects output to scart and RF (and not to things that should be discussed in the other place)?


----------



## blindlemon

I haven't seen the green bar on any output since applying LJ's patch


----------



## Nevets

Yep - that's fixed it. No green bar on any output since aplying LJ's patch!

About those pesky white flashes... I've noticed that on scenes which are primarily one strong colour, the 'white' flashes actually change to that colour (e.g. a shot of a very green lawn changes the flashes to green, and a shot of a very blue sea produces blue flashes). Has anybody else noticed this? Do you think this gives us any clues as to what's happening?


----------



## aerialplug

Personally, it looks to me as if the mpeg decoder can't cope with the bitrate/resolution. I see similar artefacts on normal resolutions occasionally when credits are being shown - or on the Sky digital channel change banner, when bits of the text appears elsewhere on the screen (usually down the bottom where the white flashed appear in mode 0).

The artefacts become much more pronounced if you REALLY turn down the bitrate (to something like 0.75Mb/s) where the mpeg really falls appart. Here, the white flashes can be seen occupying most of the screen - there really isn't enough bitrate to encode the picture here so the decoder throws its hands up in horror and displays the white flashes.

I'm surprised it's not green flashes - that's the colour "MPEG going wrong" usually seems to resort to!

It's definately been proven to be a decoding problem though, not an issue with the encoder.

What you have to remember is that the decoder chipset is about 5 year old technology now. I saw my first US DVD player only 3 years prior to this chipset being developed so it's pretty much a first generation domestic decoder/encoder combination.


----------



## B33K34

Is there a conclusion on this? I've yet to try changing anything but i've got sufficient disc space to cope. Like aerialplug i get artefacts appearing, usually on credits, which seems normal.

Mode 0 seems unreliable - is it worth upping the bitrate at all or are the benefits negligable?


----------



## aerialplug

I've given up using mode 0 for programmes that I'm going to watch through TIVo, but it still has its uses...


----------



## blindlemon

> _Originally posted by B33K34 _
> *Mode 0 seems unreliable - is it worth upping the bitrate at all or are the benefits negligable? *


 Mode 0 is not unreliable, and the benefits in terms of picture quality are very significant - especially with larger TVs and Plasmas. I've been running Mode 0 on both my lounge TiVos since May with no problems 

The main issue with using Mode 0 is that the picture is shifted to the left. This can be corrected using "LJ's fix" (see my sig). As for the "white flashes" I can honestly say that, for me, they're not really a problem. They are more like flickers than flashes - a bit like seeing a 1 frame scratch on an old movie - and they always occur right at the bottom of the screen. They also seem to happen more with poor quality, grainy or contrasty, source material. I watched the whole of "The Hours" last night, recorded in Mode 0 at 7500000/9000000, and only saw one white flicker.

One thing you should be aware of is that increasing the bitrates to make best use of the Mode 0 quality causes the TiVo to incorrectly report the number of hours available in the System Information and Video Recording Quality screens as it uses the max-bitrates set for each mode to calculate the capacities - whereas, in actual fact, the bitrate used 90% of the time for a recording (if you enable the "Save Disc Space" option, ie. VBR) is likely to be fairly close to the min-bitrate unless recording continously fast-action material.

This means that for a 120gb drive, which normally reports 39 hours Best, 63 hours High, 83 hours Medium and 135 hours Basic (based on the default CBR bitrates of 5960000, 3660000, 2760000 and 1700000 respectively) the TiVo information screens will report 25hrs Best, 38hrs High, 38hrs Medium and 114hrs Basic. However, assuming you use VBR, your actual capacities are more likely to be around 31 hours Best, 63 hours High, 92 hours Medium and 135 hours Basic based on the lower of each of the VBR bitrate pairs I have used:-

Best : 7500000/9000000, Mode 0, RQ 100
High: 3660000/6000000, Mode 0, RQ 75
Med: 2500000/5960000, Mode 0, RQ 55 
Basic: 1700000/2000000, Mode 1, RQ 0

Why not give it a go? As you have TiVoWeb you can always change back to the default modes if you don't like the results...


----------



## iankb

I think that the lower of the two values is not the minimum bitrate, but the target (or average) bitrate for VBR. I use 4800000/9000000 for Best and rarely see the white flash. Maybe I'm just lucky with the tolerance of my decoding chip. I aim for DVD resolution and 50% saving on diskspace, since I'm not using a plasma. The benefit of DVD resolution comes in when you create archive copies, since there is less conversion involved.


----------



## blindlemon

> _Originally posted by iankb _
> *I think that the lower of the two values is not the minimum bitrate, but the target (or average) bitrate for VBR. *


 Quite right.

I must stop referring to it as "min" bitrate! I guess I just think of it that way as it's the lower of the two


----------



## ccwf

> _Originally posted by blindlemon _
> *in actual fact, the bitrate used 90% of the time for a recording (if you enable the "Save Disc Space" option, ie. VBR) is likely to be fairly close to the min-bitrate unless recording continously fast-action material*


 Relatively fast for the bitrate and resolution-when using VBR for Basic quality, I often find the resultant bitrate to be towards the maximum.


----------



## swarrans

...that is the question!
I don't care about number of hours available - 10 to 15 is fine with me. If I'm using a 120GB disc and mode 0 will turning VBR on or off have any impact on the white flashes or anything else?

Simon


----------



## Dunkwho

> _Originally posted by swarrans _
> *...that is the question!
> I don't care about number of hours available - 10 to 15 is fine with me. If I'm using a 120GB disc and mode 0 will turning VBR on or off have any impact on the white flashes or anything else? *


You're gonna have to suck-it-and-see. Personally the white flashes are bad enough for me to stop using mode 0, other people report differently. We've not seen each other's units in action but the general theory is that different tivo units will handle mode 0 with differing ease - some flash a lot, others just a few times. There's no way to know what yours will do until you try it.

Duncan


----------



## JeFurry

So are the mode, the two bitrates and the recording quality percentage the only values which affect recording quality?

I've been using BoBones settings for a while now. I get white flashes occasionally, under the same circumstances other people have described, but they're not a major problem for me. However, I have been more aware of solarisation and colour banding (due to VBR, perhaps), and as as I'm about to invest in a large plasma screen (Pioneer 435XDE), I want to re-tweak.

I'm planning on downgrading "Basic" to a bare-minimum bitrate, as near as possible to audio-only recordings, restoring "Medium" to more or less its default out-of-the-box settings (but probably with VBR), changing "High" to mode 0 and highish-quality VBR, and pushing "Best" to the absolute best possible quality I can possibly get from the box regardless of space, for important stuff.

I imagine I can fiddle with this myself (and report back), but if anyone's already experimented along these lines, would you post the settings you've used, or any high/low limits I should be aware of? Ta...

[Edited to include the mode, which I forgot in the first line]


----------



## iankb

Before abandoning Mode-0 altogether, make sure that you've tried with Bobones' settings. These work for a lot of people (myself included), and maybe more extreme settings either way could have less success. You might not get a perfect picture, but it could be better than the default settings.


----------



## mrtickle

> _Originally posted by JeFurry _
> *I imagine I can fiddle with this myself (and report back), but if anyone's already experimented along these lines, would you post the settings you've used, or any high/low limits I should be aware of? Ta...
> *


Agree with the post above. If Bobones' settings don't work well for you you could try a slightly lower maximum. I use
DBSBestVBRBitrate=4800000
DBSBestMAXBitrate=6635500

For Basic quality, note there is a lower limit. 650000 is too low and the TiVo uses Best quality instead! (the tvlog also incorrectly says it is using 650000 for the recording).
675000 worked for me but I didn't try any values inbetween the two to find the absolute lowest.

Note you can also change "DefaultLiveRecordQuality" to other values - mine is at 40 so that the live buffer would be Medium quality. I thought that a mode 0 live buffer might strain the TiVo a bit much so wanted to give it a rest. The UI gets confused when you press Record to save the buffer into a recording though.

Finally, very strange things can happen when you change the Quality levels. I still don't know what is going on so I've gone back to the standard 100, 75, 40, 0 values.


----------



## JeFurry

Oh, I'll stick with mode 0 - the resolution gained can't be argued with, even aside from its ... "extra uses"! BoBones' settings are an improvement in resolution, definitely, but the VBR seems to introduce more colour banding, hence the wish to create a new "best" mode with the resolution but no banding. I'll probably tweak the bitrates again to see what is the max I can get that produces an improvement. Has anyone come across an upper limit for "Best"?

And mrtickle, what sort of strange things do you mean? Do they occur when you swap around those 4 default values you've listed, or only when you set the Quality level to something other than one of those 4? If you can let me know what to look out for, I'd appreciate it...

thanks for the replies...


----------



## mrtickle

> _Originally posted by JeFurry _
> *And mrtickle, what sort of strange things do you mean? Do they occur when you swap around those 4 default values you've listed, or only when you set the Quality level to something other than one of those 4? If you can let me know what to look out for, I'd appreciate it...
> 
> thanks for the replies... *


Apologies for the delay . I found I got very "sharp" visible pixels sometimes. Medium is 352x576, and 352 pixels in a line isn't very much, particularly when it's stretched to fill a 16:9 screen. But normally it looks fine. But on some recordings with tweaked values it looked extremely blocky with very hard edges as if the resolution was more like 176x576!


----------



## JeFurry

Thanks for that. I ended up not changing the record quality settings, since without fairly extensive patching you can only use the 4 supplied settings, and if you set both High and Best to 100 then everything gets recorded in Best anyway.

However, I did alter the bitrates. Below are what I'm currently using... though I'm still experimenting if I feel like it, I've more-or-less stabilised on these for now. They're not much different from other people's, really. I hoped to find something markedly better, but didn't. All that's changed really is my usage - I no longer need to use Best all the time:

Best: Used only for the high-bandwidth Sky channels with programmes I'll be archiving to DVD or really REALLY want at the absolute best. I've a 43" high-def plasma screen, so if guests are coming round to see something chez moi, this is the setting to use. I do get the odd white flash at the bottom, but they're rare and small - covering less than the bottom two rows of MPEG macro-blocks.

High: Used for almost all manually specified recordings, stuff I watch and wipe - still better quality than the original "Best" mode, and frankly quite good. No flashes at this or lower settings.

Medium: Used for suggestions (I use Sanderton's famous endpad to force suggestions to Medium even though my default is High) and stuff like _Have I Got News For You_ where movement is low and quality isn't paramount. LOTS of space at this setting!

Basic: Used for audio only. Lowest video bandwidth I could get without problems.

DBSBestVBRBitrate 7 000 000
DBSBestMAXBitrate 9 000 000
DBSBestResolution 0

DBSHighVBRBitrate 5 500 000
DBSHighMAXBitrate 7 000 000
DBSHighResolution 4

DBSMediumVBRBitrate 2 760 000
DBSMediumMAXBitrate 4 000 000
DBSMediumResolution 1

DBSBasicVBRBitrate 675 000
DBSBasicMAXBitrate 675 000
DBSBasicResolution 1

I experimented with much higher bitrates for Best, and only found more flashes with no visible improvement in quality. With High, I whacked the settings up massively, then lowered them until just before the quality became less than satisfactory. Medium's fairly soft and fuzzy, but not heavily pixellated. I wanted to get an efficient use of space without making it look like crap, and although the recording resolution is low, it manages to look soft-focus rather than pixellated most of the time. VBR means that it's got some headroom if needed. Basic speaks for itself.

Hope that's of use to someone - sorry I couldn't find anything more revolutionary, but I guess those who did this before me had done a fine job and there simply wasn't much room for improvement, only tweaking to taste.

-Jef.


----------



## swarrans

JeFury - how is your banding issue now? I've got a plasma too and I think the banding is worse with mode 0 and 9m/7.5m settings - plus the colours look even more lurid than normal. I'm seriously considering going back to original settings as I'm not convinced I see an overall improvement in quality.

Simon


----------



## scgf

After some experimentation I decided on a BestVBRBitrate of 5960000 and a BestMAXBitrate of 8560000, mode 0.

I recently tried the 7000000/9000000 settings but found the quality on my plasma screen to be inferior to my old settings. It wasn't so much the objective quality but more of a subjective thing. I went with 7000000/9000000 for a few days then switched back. The difference is very noticeable - the picture is now somehow more watchable. There are fewer digital artifacts too.

Maybe a particular combination of VBR & MAX bitrates does more than the individual settings would suggest?


----------



## swarrans

Thanks scgf, I'll certainly try it.
As I don't have Tivo web or anything (bought the drive with mode 0) I'll try and get one of those serial cables...

Simon


----------



## JeFurry

> _Originally posted by swarrans _
> *JeFury - how is your banding issue now? I've got a plasma too and I think the banding is worse with mode 0 and 9m/7.5m settings - plus the colours look even more lurid than normal. I'm seriously considering going back to original settings as I'm not convinced I see an overall improvement in quality.
> 
> Simon *


It's actually harder to tell than you'd think - I have a high-def plasma with all sorts of smart gradient smoothing capabilities, and it makes quite a difference when I turn selected ones on or off.

With as many of the filters turned off as I can get, it's still way better than my old 100Hz CRT (which was an early one, and had the negative effect of solarizing images badly, so I'm kinda spoiled by the plasma which smooths things out).

I think this depends so much on your own equipment that any comparison I might offer wouldn't help lots.

However, scgf's suggestion is something I haven't tried... it simply didn't occur to me to lower the maximum rate. I shall experiment further, probably over Christmas, and report back.


----------



## Fatbloke

I tried this yesterday and finally got it working in mode 0.
Since live TV is set to BEST, I've noticed it's chopping off the left side of the picture. Things like the 'Sky News' logo now read 'ky News' !

My question is, will the LJ fpga7114 file shift the picture to the right or more to the left? I can't see any green bar on my TV at the moment.

Either that, or is it possible to change Live buffer to 'High quality' ?

Happy Christmas!


----------



## Lysander

Fatbloke,

The patch should solve that. The reason you can't see the green bar is the overscan on your TV, you still need LJs patch when using Mode 0.

Lysander. (Stuffed...)


----------



## Fatbloke

Ah, some confusion here.
I CAN see the green par at the bottom of the screen that shows you how far through the buffer you are. That's fine.
However, I was just commenting that luckily I cant see and of the vertical green edge on right side of the screen that I've noticed when I've done undiscussable things 

So I was wondering whether the patch would just shift the picture to the right a small way?


----------



## Lysander

Nope, no confusion. The vertical green bar on the right is there on all pictures in Mode 0, but if the overscan on your TV is quite large then it will not be shown.

LJ's patch will indeed move the picture to the right.


----------



## blindlemon

LJ's patch moves the picture to the right on the _input_ to the encoder too, so the green bar disappears from the recording too 

If you have that much overscan on your TV though you are missing quite a bit of your screen! Most TVs allow you to fix this from the Service menu - but you may need to hunt around to find how to access it.


----------



## gyre

OK, after a goodly period of time folks will have worked out what settings are best for them.

Is there a general concensus on what is the best setting for mode 0 for best quality?

Thanks!

-- gyre --


----------



## kitschcamp

Not really. What works for one seems not to for others. I haven't found a range yet that do not lead to lip sync problems eventually.


----------



## Fatbloke

> _Originally posted by Lysander _
> *LJ's patch will indeed move the picture to the right. *


Worked a treat !


----------



## zerolight

Just done mine, to Blindlemon's settings (only for Best, and set High to be what best was, including RQ 100).

What's strange is that I could swear that CATV Best resolution was 2 before the change. ???

I am using NTL Digi Cable so it is the CATV settings I'm meant to change right?


----------



## Fozzie

Yes, it is set to 2 by default and yes, CATV are the ones to change.


----------



## dave h-j

Thanks to all who have contributed in this thread - I've changed mine yesterday to run a best of res 0 bit rate of 8.3M (only because it was a power of 2) - which is perfect.

The recordings are a little on the large size now - so i'm probably going to activate the VBR options to see what difference that makes..

Ta


----------



## zerolight

After much trial and error, I've decided that blindlemons bitrates but on mode 4 (std best) instead of mode 0 gives the best picture on my pani plasma. its marginally softer, but cleans away all the digital artifacts that become visible on mode 0, and gets rid of the increasingly bothersome flicker on the bottom of the screen.


----------



## markabuckley

Can I ask a question please .... with regards to the left shift ....

Once I transfer them to the PC - will the whole picture be there - left shifted - or does the left shift - actually shift part of the picture off ... ? 

Thanks, Mark.


----------



## Nevets

Im my experience it actually cut some of the picture off, and also added the green bar on the right hand side. LJ's patch fixes this though.


----------



## Waveney

Looking as a new boy (as far as TiVo goes) at this thread, perhaps it would be of interest to know what can be done with MPEG2. 

I have worked with TV companies, encoding companies and have recently specified a Room with a View project for a hospital, which uses a remote camera and an MPEG2 encoder sending the images for high resolution presentation in wards at the hospital - this is broadcast quality at a 2M data rate.

Going back a few years, a panel at a conference I was at was asked what is the ideal data rate to transmit TV:
BBC - 8M
ITV - 6M
Astra (sky) - As low as I can get away with (less than 2M if possible) - I make more money from 4 2M channels than 1 8M channel.

Many channels on sky that are totaly prerecorded operate below 2M these days, they pay to have the programmes (and adverts) compressed efficiently - this is complex, non real time and costly, but the results are such that almost all material can be encoded at 2M and below. These offline systems cost a lot, scan through the image and look for scene changes, and then work around them trying out various encoding of each macro block looking for the best quaility at the rate available. For scene changes it may send material ahead of the time it is needed. 

This can compress some films (and many cartons) to 1.2M or
below. That is why Sky fit ever more channels in.

There is a tradeoff between delay, costs, image quality and datarate. To get the hospital system I compromised delay (slightly), paid heaviliy under cost, and got a high quality image at a low data rate.


----------



## ccwf

Question I don't recall being posed here: what resolution do Sky and cable companies use when sending the video? After all, despite all the interest in mode 0, there is little point in telling the TiVo DVR to record at mode 0 resolution if Best resolution is already as high as the resolution sent by Sky/cable. One would be better off increasing the bitrate of Best quality recordings instead and using that.

I get the hybrid analog/digital cable typical here in the States, and I've posted some sample images, which show that different channels are transmitted at different resolutions.

On a related note, I recall a post by mrtickle with images from recordings made at two different Quality settings with everything else being otherwise identical. I'd be curious to do the same type of analysis on his images because I'm guessing the Quality setting might control how much of the high frequency information is thrown out of the picture (although not necessarily in a uniform way). Can anyone find that old post? (Probably in the archive now.)


----------



## iankb

> _Originally posted by ccwf _
> *Question I don't recall being posed here: what resolution do Sky and cable companies use when sending the video? After all, despite all the interest in mode 0, there is little point in telling the TiVo DVR to record at mode 0 resolution if Best resolution is already as high as the resolution sent by Sky/cable.*


I believe that it is variable by channel on Sky. There is some point in it, in that archival to DVD (if that were possible  ) wouldn't require conversion for resolution.


----------



## Waveney

_what resolution do Sky and cable companies use when sending the video? _

This varies on a per channel basis and varies from about 1.2M to 8M (for the video channels, audio is far far lower). But as the TiVo does not get the raw MPEG this is irrelivant, if it could it could use a lot less space.

There are three main categories of MPEG codecs available, that suit different applications. These tradeoff between delay, cost, quality and datarate.

Cheap real time codecs (as used by TiVo): low delay, cheap, maintain quaility by a relatively high datarate.

Expensive real time codecs (as used by TV stations - start at around 7000 pounds): low delay, expensive, high quailty and modest datarate (2 to 8M)

Very expensive offline codecs (as used to preprepare films and material for cheap distribution - usually by specialist companies for the film distributors) - Can take days to encode a film (used to be weeks), very expensive, high quaility and very low data rates.

The inportance of the quantity is illustrated by some well known errors and examples: An infamous error from the early days of MPEG was of a motor race, with clearly definded spectators and square wheels. Only last week at an exhibition in London, I saw skying being show that had been coded on the cheap - when on the flat, the skies looked ok, but when they went downhill, it was on sawblades :-(.

Cheap codecs only code frames, and forward differences in frames, they rarely do motion vectors and never handle back frames, nor scan material for best ways to encode each macroblock. You get what you pay for.


----------



## Dibblah

> _Originally posted by ccwf _
> *Question I don't recall being posed here: what resolution do Sky and cable companies use when sending the video? After all, despite all the interest in mode 0, there is little point in telling the TiVo DVR to record at mode 0 resolution if Best resolution is already as high as the resolution sent by Sky/cable. One would be better off increasing the bitrate of Best quality recordings instead and using that.
> 
> I get the hybrid analog/digital cable typical here in the States, and I've posted some sample images, which show that different channels are transmitted at different resolutions.
> *


All the Sky channels come off the MPEG decoder at 720x576.

Cheers,

Allan.


----------



## ccwf

> _Originally posted by Dibblah _
> *All the Sky channels come off the MPEG decoder at 720x576.*


 Interesting. From what I've read, Sky's counterpart DirecTV now uses different resolutions for different channels, whereas the other major satellite company, DISH, uses a fixed but lower resolution. (They both use varying bit rates, but I'm mostly discussing horizontal resolution here.)


----------



## noel-pilot

just gone through all these pages!! made the tivoweb changes for the mode 0 higher resolution a week ago but it made no difference, I hadnt previously seen any mention of a file change. Have followed the link to LJs page but dont know what to do with the file. when i click it it opens a page of weird characters, and when i right click and save as it wants to save as text. what should it be saved and transferred as??!!

Thanks


----------



## blindlemon

You need to rename the file to fpga7114.o and follow the instructions on LJ's page....

Also, did you press Enter after changing each value on the Bitrates page and the hit the Update Resources link on the previous menu before rebooting?


----------



## noel-pilot

Yeah I took a stab at the LJ file and tried just that. Seemed to go on fine but the quality of my normal tivo picture is now worse, there is green interference at the top of the screen and various artefacts appearing as well. I assume this is due to the changing of this file. Is there anything I can do to improve this??
Need to find the settings for the bitrates etc for tivoweb again because it still does not appear to be in DVD resolution! Anyone got a link to those settings? have seen them in a number of places but not with explanations of which one is which!

Thanks again, (going to look at tytool and mfs ftp somemore maybe use instead of tystudio!!)


----------



## thechachman

noel-pilot said:


> Yeah I took a stab at the LJ file and tried just that. Seemed to go on fine but the quality of my normal tivo picture is now worse, there is green interference at the top of the screen and various artefacts appearing as well. I assume this is due to the changing of this file. Is there anything I can do to improve this?? Need to find the settings for the bitrates etc for tivoweb again because it still does not appear to be in DVD resolution! Anyone got a link to those settings? have seen them in a number of places but not with explanations of which one is which!


Below are the settings we use, YMMV. As per MediaLab's MPEG Properties utility, my resulting tystudio converted mpeg output from 'best' is 720x576 at 7.52Mbits and crisp and crackle free.

MinRecordQuality 0
MaxRecordQuality 100
DefaultRecordQuality 100
DefaultLiveRecordQuality 100
RecordQualityBest 100
RecordQualityHigh 100
RecordQualityMedium 80
RecordQualityBasic 65

DBSBestVBRBitrate 7680000
DBSBestMAXBitrate 9900000
DBSBestResolution 0

DBSHighVBRBitrate 5960000
DBSHighMAXBitrate 7680000
DBSHighResolution 0

DBSMediumVBRBitrate 5960000
DBSMediumMAXBitrate 7680000
DBSMediumResolution 0

DBSBasicVBRBitrate 3600000
DBSBasicMAXBitrate 5960000
DBSBasicResolution 4


----------



## ccwf

It looks like your Medium and High settings are the same except for the Quality. Could you describe the difference the Quality settings makes.

We had a discussion about Quality a while back in this forum, but we didn't resolve exactly what Quality did. My guess is that it controls a low-pass filter (based on no testing, but that would be a reasonable thing for it to do).


----------



## sanderton

Whether or not it does anything is often debated; folks have posted evidence that it does. If it does then there's a fundamental design fault in the TiVo database, and that really doesn't sit well with what I've seen is a really nicely designed database system. One day I'll get round to doing some tests myself!

One thing that is for sure is that if you have High and Best both set to 100 as you do, the TiVo is going to get very confused as it uses the *numeric * value to determine which overall recording quality it uses.

Ie, if you set a recording to be at Best, the database notes that in the To Do List solely as RecordingQuality=100. In your case it would also set a High recording to 100. Result... ???

Lord knows which set of bitrates get used for a recording set in Best or High on your system. Sounds like it's using "High"?

Using a value which is a variable controlling some aspect of the MPEG as the identifier for the overall quality setting is such a deeply un TiVo design team thing to do, I have trouble accepting the evidence that it is the case.


----------



## noel-pilot

thanks for that, just plugged them in albeit using the basic setting as the mode 0 for a test. will see how it pans out in a little while!!


----------



## thechachman

ccwf said:


> It looks like your Medium and High settings are the same except for the Quality. Could you describe the difference the Quality settings makes.
> 
> We had a discussion about Quality a while back in this forum, but we didn't resolve exactly what Quality did. My guess is that it controls a low-pass filter (based on no testing, but that would be a reasonable thing for it to do).


Actually I approached it assuming it was along the lines of a (albeit inversely scaled to be 100 to 1) compression setting akin to JPEG processing and through trial and error we decided that 80 allowed us to reduce filesize quite a bit with little or no discernable difference during playback. We use Medium for soaps/sitcoms/etc, High for season passes, sports and whatnot, and Best obviously for bits to be archived off-Tivo, and as it is all getting displayed on a plasma we figured may as well go mode 0 throughout (given we've put 2x160gb in ours space isn't too big an issue), I use basic when I want to mock up a VCR style composite feed 

While I'm not nearly as tivo'd up as yourself and many others here, my experience puttering around leads me to believe there are two main rules at work:

1) bitrates must adhere to: basic <= medium <= high <= best (not just less than ) as my boundary approach is stable

2) the overall settings used for best/high/medium/basic are considered as a function of min/max, quality and mode not just one set of the variables. Whenever I had two setting (high & best) exactly the same min/max/quality/mode the tivo got flaky and blocky within a day or so, but as long as I had some decrease in each move from best to high to medium to basic, whether it be a drop in bitrates, a drop in quality, or a change in mode, as long as something changed (as pointed out, my settings dupe for mode/bitrates but allow more compression for medium)


----------



## sanderton

Just tried recording the same program on "Medium" with Medium set to RecQual of 99 then ReqQual of 1, all other things equal.

The first thing is that the recording with a setting of 99 _DIDN'T RECORD USING THE SETTINGS FOR MEDIUM_. It recorded using the High values. I know this because Medium on my setup is mode 0, and the ReqQual 99 video came over as 480 x 576, the setting for High.

This suggests to me that some folks who have seen a big change in pic quality by altering that setting may simply have unwittingly been looking at the difference between High and Medium or Basic.

The second thing is that the ReqQual 1 video looks absolutely A1 fine to me - although I'd need to do some more tests to be absolutely sure it's not in some way degraded.


----------



## noel-pilot

Over the past few weeks someone either on here or on the other forum has in their signature a link to a program that you can open up mpeg files and it tells you the resolution and stuff. I downloaded it but have lost it now and can't find the post or the person.
Can anyone tell me what it is?
Thanks


----------



## Fozzie

noel-pilot said:


> Over the past few weeks someone either on here or on the other forum has in their signature a link to a program that you can open up mpeg files and it tells you the resolution and stuff. I downloaded it but have lost it now and can't find the post or the person.
> Can anyone tell me what it is?
> Thanks


DVDpatcher ?


----------



## iankb

DVDPatcher is the useful one since it allows you to change the aspect ratio of TiVo archive files from 4:3 to 16:9, when appropriate.


----------



## noel-pilot

ass!! applied the above settings to resource editor and put the LJ file back in there, result = no green fuzzy ness on screen anymore which is good, but just extracted a file that I recorded in best (having now applied the mode 0 settings for best) and put it into dvd lab and dvd patcher and they still reporting the lower resolution of 480 x 576!
Am I right in thinking I have to change the altbitrates as well?
This is driving me mad! 

I have uploaded the LJ file as it should be. Updated my resources info pressing return after each one and rebooting after all of them done.

Anything else I should do?!?!
Thank you as always

aha! just discovered the green bar that everyone talks about! managed to suss out dvd patcher to patch the whole file instead of the header and i have the green bar, I assume it is this bar that the mode 0 patch to the tivo removes?

If I can get a dvd even with this green bar to play in the car i will be a very happy bunny!! Advice ref the above greatly appreciated


----------



## Fozzie

Which bitrates are you changing? What is your recording source? (Cable, Sky etc) No, you don't need to change the altbitrates.


----------



## noel-pilot

recording source is freeview and aerial, hmmm then, would someone (if its not too much trouble) pm or post up their resource settings that has just changed one quality level to give mode 0? Or am I ok changing them all to the same as the above settings?!


----------



## Fozzie

Yes, but which resource settings have you changed so far and to what?


----------



## noel-pilot

Originally I followed another guide which said change both alt and normal bitrates, just changed the basic settings as I didnt want to risk my high or best ones cocking up to start with. Then I found the lj page and used the file and I have now changed my best settings to be as the best settings above altho I have changed my alt settings to be that as well.
Thanks fozzie!!


----------



## Fozzie

Sorry, that still doesn't help. I'm trying to establish exactly which resource settings you have changed and to what values. It's not clear. Just listing them would be clearer.

You say you did a recording in best but it wasn't at mode 0 resolution? What was the recording source? If it was using the tuner and you haven't changed the tuner resolution (which it doesn't look like you have but I can't be sure unless you list your current settings)then it wouldn't be. What is selected with Guided Setup for Freeview? I don't have Freeview so don't know. Depending on what was selected you may need to change the CATV settings and not the DBS ones.

Just to be clear:

1. It is the Resolution setting in the resources that should be set to 0 for a mode 0 recording.
2. The fpga patch gets rid of the green bar when outputting from TiVo to a display by shifting the picture. It doesn't get rid of it in the video stream.
3. You don't need to touch the altbitrate settings.
4. Confirm you have also clicked on Update Resources in Tivoweb (after pressing return after each setting change) before rebooting?

Tip: Just work with one recording type and change one setting at a time to get mode 0 working, then you know where you are. Once you've got it sussed then start changing other settings


----------



## sanderton

To be clear, there is more than one "Best", there are Bests for satellite, cable and aerial inputs. Are you sure you changed the appropriate one?

Freeview is cable ("CATV") as far as TiVo is concerned.

For reasons known only to TiVo, it records Freeview "Best" at a lower resolution than Sky "Best", so there is an intermediate setting (Mode 4) you might want to try rather than go the whole hog to Mode 0.


----------



## bobones

I can confirm that freeview uses the CATV bitrates.


----------



## noel-pilot

DBSBestVBRBitrate	7680000
DBSBestMAXBitrate	9900000
DBSBestResolution 0

Thats what I have for best at the moment, Am I correct in assuming it doesnt matter what the other settings are in that they wont affect best recordings? I currently have basic set to the same as above.
I also have the same settings as above in the alt bitrates best settings.

1) Thanks im with you there!!
2) so does the fpga patch ONLY get rid of the green bar when viewing straight from a tivo? i.e. if i extract using tystudio will i have the green bar there?

I havent changed the catv ones but i could try it! that would explain it.
the tuner is only used for channel 4, everything else is on freeview.


----------



## Fozzie

I'm not sure what you mean in the first part of your post; The Best settings only affect Best quality recordings, the High settings only affect High quality recordings etc etc.

You should be changing the CATV settings and not the DBS ones.

Ref 2) - Correct and yes; But, it won't (shouldn't) be seen once DVD'd (if there is such a verb!)

Don't forget, one shouldn't be taking about ext****ion here


----------



## sanderton

I thought the fpga patch affected the INPUT, so would remove (or reduce) the green bar?


----------



## noel-pilot

fozzie: good point!! sorry forgot about the not talking bit! eesch sorry mods, (slaps wrist)
sanderton: thats what I thought, i thought the point of the patch was that the input wouldnt have the green then no matter what you did with it, it would be a clear picture


----------



## Fozzie

I thought it was the OUTPUT and hence it still being there when viewed externally.

However, I also remember the raging debate about what affected video input and what affected the output... Was it ever resolved?!


----------



## noel-pilot

aah i missed the couple of posts above about freeview being cable and therefore CATV!!! just testing now!


----------



## noel-pilot

woohoo...thanks everyone think im there. Can someone confirm, CATV is for cable (freeview) which settings are for aerial?!?

Will update in a short while.


----------



## Fozzie

Ahem, you really should read the thread more thoroughly 

Yes & Rooftop!


----------



## bobones

Fozzie said:


> I thought it was the OUTPUT and hence it still being there when viewed externally.
> 
> However, I also remember the raging debate about what affected video input and what affected the output... Was it ever resolved?!


The fpga patch fixes the green bar problem on video input so it fixes recordings too. The brightness and saturation issues only exist on video output (recordings themselves are not overly bright and saturated) and only the iicset commands applied at boot time have any lasting effect, but they have a tendency to hang the tivo when applied (however, see blindlemon's checkrgb script which addresses this problem).


----------



## blindlemon

sanderton said:


> the recording with a setting of 99 _DIDN'T RECORD USING THE SETTINGS FOR MEDIUM_. It recorded using the High values. I know this because Medium on my setup is mode 0, and the ReqQual 99 video came over as 480 x 576, the setting for High.


What bitrate was it recorded at, and how did you schedule the recording?

If you scheduled it from TiVoWeb then it may be that you need to hack ui.itcl, which has some hardcoded values for RQ.



sanderton said:


> The second thing is that the ReqQual 1 video looks absolutely A1 fine to me - although I'd need to do some more tests to be absolutely sure it's not in some way degraded.


I have recently been playing around with RQ again, and have come to the conclusion that there either some kind of "extra" parameter that is passed by the TiVo to the encoder, depending on the quality (ie. "high", "medium" etc.) selected in the UI, _or_ that the sharpness of the image is also dependent on the bitrate selected (or both).

My previous tests seemed to show that there is some kind of boundary at between 65 and 80 RQ where the picture goes from slightly fuzzy to really sharp. I had assumed this was _only _ related to the RQ setting, as that was what I was changing at the time.

However, those tests were done by changing the RQ for "basic", and keeping the same high bitrates for each. I have since discovered that simply increasing the RQ for a "medium" quality recording to 75 *does not* change the sharpness as I would have expected. A "medium" recording at RQ 75 with bitrates of 3660000/6000000 still looks fuzzy (2nd image) compared to a "high" recording with exactly the same parameters, which looks like the 1st image!!

I'll do some more poking around this evening and post anything significant


----------



## sanderton

blindlemon said:


> What bitrate was it recorded at, and how did you schedule the recording?
> 
> If you scheduled it from TiVoWeb then it may be that you need to hack ui.itcl, which has some hardcoded values for RQ.


From Live TV and the TiVo interface. I used the Best bitrates.



blindlemon said:


> My previous tests seemed to show that there is some kind of boundary at between 65 and 80 RQ where the picture goes from slightly fuzzy to really sharp. I had assumed this was _only _ related to the RQ setting, as that was what I was changing at the time.
> 
> However, those tests were done by changing the RQ for "basic", and keeping the same high bitrates for each. I have since discovered that simply increasing the RQ for a "medium" quality recording to 75 *does not* change the sharpness as I would have expected. A "medium" recording at RQ 75 with bitrates of 3660000/6000000 still looks fuzzy (2nd image) compared to a "high" recording with exactly the same parameters, which looks like the 1st image!!
> 
> I'll do some more poking around this evening and post anything significant


This fits with my findings, that the "boundary number" of 75 means that anything 75-99 is recorded at High, anything less at Medium.

IIRC the ReqQual of High is 75? I'm not sure how you can set "a medium recording with RQ of 75" as that is *just a High recording*. There are *no * other parameters in the Recording object in the DB which distinguish a recording to be made in High or Medium other than that single number. The Recording object is all TiVo has to go on in setting up the recording. It doesn't know that you selected High or Medium from the menu, just that it has a RecQual of 75 entered in the db.


----------



## bobones

Stuart has got this right: RQ is not a parameter to the encoder; it doesn't affect the video process at all. However, the RQ values do have some meaning in tivo's logic for selecting a set of encoding parameters, and tivoweb has probably attached some meaning to them too. The actual encoding parameters are resolution, bitrate and maximum bitrate as determined by the tivo's mode, vbr and maxvbr variables. My own opinion is that it's pretty much a waste of time to change the default RQ values in the search for a better picture.


----------



## blindlemon

So why, in that case, does changing the RQ from 1 to 99 or 70 to 75 seem to make a difference if all other variables (mode, bitrate etc.) are the same?

I've done some more tests this evening, all using Mode 0, firstly setting "Best" to an RQ of 100, 75 and 40, always with the same bitrates (7500000/9000000) and ensuring that "high" and "medium" both had lower RQs than "best" to avoid confusing the TiVo UI.

Here are the bitmaps:-

100:









75:









40:









Clearly, there isn't much difference between them, so it seems that if you tell the TiVo UI to record at "best" then it will, regardless of the RQ.

I then wanted to see what would happen if I tried to force "medium" to be better quality by increasing the RQ, so I made a "medium" recording with an RQ of 75 and bitrates of 7500000/9000000 (ensuring that "best" and "high" had higher RQs of 100 and 95 respectively to avoid confusing the TiVo UI):-










Hmmm. Doesn't look like that worked then! This time the TiVo seems to have decided to record at a lower quality because I used "medium", regardless of the RQ.

So, I tried to confuse it. This time I set "medium" to 75, "best" to 100 and "high" to 55 - _lower_ than "medium". I also set the bitrates for "medium" to 7500001/9000001 so that I could check that the TiVo was really making a "medium" recording:-










Interesting. This looks better - but wait! The bitrates in the log show the recording was made at 3600000/6000000 - that's "high"! Sure enough, the TiVo UI lists the quality of the recording as "high" too, and that's what it is. So Stuart is proved right: the TiVo has interpreted the RQ setting of 75 (the second highest) as "high" and made a "high" recording - even though I selected "medium" in the UI when I set up the recording, and the RQ of 75 is the RQ stored in the database for "medium"!

This explains why my "medium" recording with an RQ of 75 looks worse than the "best" one with an RQ of 40.

So I've proved myself wrong! The numeric value of the RQ has no significance other than as a placeholder. The values might as well be set to 0, 1, 2 and 3. OK, so let's try that:-

MinRecordQuality=0 
MaxRecordQuality=3 
DefaultRecordQuality=0
DefaultLiveRecordQuality=0
RecordQualityBest=3 
RecordQualityHigh=2 
RecordQualityMedium=1
RecordQualityBasic=0

3:









2:









1:









I've checked the tvlog and the recordings were made at the appropriate "best", "high" and "medium" bitrates and are described correctly in the TiVo UI.

Conclusion: *Dang! It looks like there's no way to have more than two "high quality" recording modes.* It clearly doesn't matter which "quality" you use, although if you assign the 2nd highest RQ to "medium" you will be in a world of confusion as your "medium" recordings will be transformed into "high" ones by the TiVo UI rendering "medium" somewhat obsolete!

Of course, this *still* doesn't explain why the default RQs are 0, 40, 75 and 100 though. As proved above they might as well be 0-3 or, I guess, any other ascending sequence. But the thing that really gets to me, as a progammer, is that I fail to see why _anybody_ would choose values like 75 and 40 _unless they meant something_ other than simply "75 is higher than 40"....

Eh? Uh? ... Duh?


----------



## sanderton

I'd guess Tivo's engineers experimented with having different numbers of quality settings (doesn't one US version have an "Ultimate" above Best?), so an even 4 way didn't work. Or perhaps it's their subjective judgement of quality on a scale of 1 to 100? Or they didn't like the rounding of having 0/33/67/100. Or perhaps the db does some maths logic and they needed to be sure the quality settings worked right with that? Or maybe they loved tennis and thought its scoring system was great?


----------



## blindlemon

In that case I guess "high" ought to be called "deuce" 

I'd love to know what prompted them to choose such an odd set of numbers. If 0,1,2 and 3 are good enough then why on earth would they not use them?

Ahh well - I guess we'll never know.... unless one of them is reading this thread? TiVoRich? TiVoPony? Hello?

On a more serious note I'm pretty disappointed that it doesn't seem possible to have more than 2 really sharp Mode 0 qualities. I was hoping to go for something like (assuming the RQ number actually _meant _ something):-

Best: 7500000/9000000, Mode 0, RQ 100
High: 4800000/6000000, Mode 0, RQ 95
Med: 3660000/4800000, Mode 0, RQ 75
Basic: any old crap!

Still, it's interesting that the 3rd quality (medium) does look a lot better (cleaner and smoother) in Mode 0 with the higher bitrates above - and with VBR, doesn't seem to take up much more space than at 2760000/5960000 which I was using before.

I'll live with these settings for a while and post anything significant.

On a different but related note, I was tinkering with CBR bitrates a while back and found that using 15000000, the theoretical maximum of the encoder was awful for white flashes on movie credits! Absolutely horrendous!


----------



## sanderton

I've turned off VBR now as I found the extra artifacting - on pans, zooms and fades in particular - was too annoying. As a lot of recordings have shifted the the MCE box, I can afford the extra space.


----------



## gyre

What values do you use now stu?

-- gyre --


----------



## sanderton

Normal ones for Best. I didn't find the improvement for Mode 0 particularly noticeable with the "quality" of Sky input, and I have no problems with DVDs from Mode 4 video.


----------



## terryeden

blindlemon said:


> Best: 7500000/9000000, Mode 0, RQ 100
> High: 4800000/6000000, Mode 0, RQ 95
> Med: 3660000/4800000, Mode 0, RQ 75
> Basic: any old crap!


For basic, I found you can get down to 675000.
See my post http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=222298

Perfect for recording on the radio - a 30 minute recording is around 172MB. So, 101 hours of Radio 4 on a 40GB TiVo.

Terry


----------



## sanderton

If you enable VBR, radio recordings plummet no matter what notional bitrates you put in.


----------



## ccwf

sanderton said:


> Normal ones for Best. I didn't find the improvement for Mode 0 particularly noticeable with the "quality" of Sky input, and I have no problems with DVDs from Mode 4 video.


 This is an important point. If the real resolution of the source signal is less than mode 4 resolution, then, by itself, using mode 0 instead of mode 4 yields no real improvement in quality. One is better off using mode 4 (or even lower resolution than that depending on the source) but increasing the bitrate.

That is what I myself have done. I performed Fourier transforms of signals from various channels to see how much horizontal resolution was really in them. Then I set up a range of modes for recording quality settings adequate to cover each of those source resolutions. Finally I increased bitrates.


----------



## gyre

Folks,

Am I right in thinking that changing 'high' to mode 0 and a 7500000 bitrate would give the same recording as changing 'best' to the same set of values?

i.e. a quality of 75 is the same as a quality of 100 as far as the resulting recording is concerned.

The reason I don't want to change 'best' is that I don't wish to get white flashing on live tv.

Thanks!

-- gyre --


----------



## bobones

gyre said:


> Am I right in thinking that changing 'high' to mode 0 and a 7500000 bitrate would give the same recording as changing 'best' to the same set of values?
> -- gyre --


Yes, but you may as well try VBR and save disk space as well as increasing resolution yet have enough bitrate headroom to avoid artifacts.

I use 9000000/4800000/mode0 on Best (100) and 7000000/3200000/mode0 on High (75) with excellent results. (My default recording mode is High, but live is viewed on Best).

Remember the filesize/disk usage will be related to the vbr figure, not the maxvbr figure.


----------



## bobones

ccwf said:


> This is an important point. If the real resolution of the source signal is less than mode 4 resolution, then, by itself, using mode 0 instead of mode 4 yields no real improvement in quality. One is better off using mode 4 (or even lower resolution than that depending on the source) but increasing the bitrate.


The difference between mode0 and mode4 is very clear on my 43" display no matter the source. UK Freeview channels have a lot of widescreen output were the resolution does matter, but not only that, mode4 suffers from colour misconvergence that's not apparent in mode0. This is very clear with red text on a white background.


----------



## gyre

I will try VBR. Seems sensible if it works and doesn't give me artifacts nor lip sync problems.

My question was whether it made any difference if I changed the values for 'high' as opposed to 'best'. i.e. whether I'd see any difference in the recorded video quality. I think your answer is saying that I woudln't see a difference.

From the discussion above in the thread, it looks to me like you can have up to 2 sharp resolutions.

Thanks!

-- gyre --


----------



## bobones

gyre said:


> I will try VBR. Seems sensible if it works and doesn't give me artifacts nor lip sync problems.
> 
> My question was whether it made any difference if I changed the values for 'high' as opposed to 'best'. i.e. whether I'd see any difference in the recorded video quality. I think your answer is saying that I woudln't see a difference.
> 
> From the discussion above in the thread, it looks to me like you can have up to 2 sharp resolutions.
> -- gyre --


VBR doesn't affect the white flashing, which seems to happen whatever bitrates are used with mode 0. Lip sync can occasionally be a problem, but whether it's down to VBR, I don't know. Others have reported other artifacts with VBR but I have never noticed anything amiss myself.

This whole Record Quality thing is a red herring. Just keep the defaults and change the bitrates to whatever you want. I don't see why you can't assign high bitrates to medium and basic if you leave the RQ values as they were.


----------



## gyre

I've done mode 0 on 'basic'. It seemed blurred compared to what I'm getting on 'high'.

This might be a figment of my imagination, or it might be that only 2 modes are nice and sharp and the other 2 are blurry.

I'm willing to be proved wrong 

-- gyre --


----------



## blindlemon

gyre said:


> or it might be that only 2 modes are nice and sharp and the other 2 are blurry.


I used to think that the RQ in itself was what made the difference, but I am now convinced that it was indeed at least a pink herring as, regardless of RQ, you can only have 2 "sharp" qualities, and 2 slightly blurry ones.

It _is_ possible to set "basic" to be one of the sharp ones, so long as you assign it one of the 2 highest RQ values out of the 4 allowed.

I agree with Bobones though, that a higher VBRbitrate will result in an improvement in PQ even in the 2 "blurry" qualities.

If you want to avoid flashes on Live TV then set the DefaultLiveRecordQuality to the same RQ as a quality that doesn't use Mode 0.


----------



## gyre

This all makes sense. Thanks you folks 

-- gyre --


----------



## bobones

I now concur with blindlemon. The lower 2 RQ values are always slightly softer than the higher 2, no matter the values. It's as though the highest frequencies are filtered out on the 2 low RQ values. The real benefits of mode 0 will not be seen on anything other than the two higher RQs.


----------



## ccwf

bobones said:


> The difference between mode0 and mode4 is very clear on my 43" display no matter the source. UK Freeview channels have a lot of widescreen output were the resolution does matter, but not only that, mode4 suffers from colour misconvergence that's not apparent in mode0. This is very clear with red text on a white background.


 I've read about the colour convergence issue but have never seen it myself (it only seems to affect UK TiVo DVRs).

On Freeview, are you saying that all Freeview channels are high-resolution or that you only watch Freeview? Because if you use a plain old aerial instead of Freeview, then there should be no real benefit to mode 0.


----------



## bobones

ccwf said:


> On Freeview, are you saying that all Freeview channels are high-resolution or that you only watch Freeview? Because if you use a plain old aerial instead of Freeview, then there should be no real benefit to mode 0.


I am saying that much of the programming on Freeview is high-res anamorphic widescreen where mode 0 offers noticeable improvements over mode 4. And, no I don't use the plain old aerial on my tivo at all, only freeview.


----------



## sanderton

Remember Freeview defaults to mode 2, not 4.


----------



## martinpw

I've changed by settings for best, and want to change them back, but I forgot what the original settings are!! can anyone help?


----------



## blindlemon

5960000/5960000, Mode 4 (mode 2 for CATV), RQ 100


----------



## mrhatken

Howdy All,

Thanks for this great thread! I'm an Aussie with a Thomson UK TivO that's working very well down-under (even though we don't have an official TiVo service here). But that's another story ...

I am writing here to ask a few questions about setting my TiVo to use Mode 0. I've read through this thread (and others) and made the changes suggested in LJ's Mode 0 page, with BoBones settings for 720 VBR (setup on the High slot).

The settings I used were:

CATVHighVBRBitrate 3660000 -> 4800000
CATVHighMABBitrate 3660000 -> 90000009
CATVHighResolution 2 -> 0

I made sure I hit enter when changing all the resources. I copied LJ's file to the TiVo in binary mode and replaced the original with the new file. I turned on "Save Disk Space" then rebooted. The TiVo crashed (rebooted) frequently for a while (6 times?).

It crashed when I was watching live TV (on Best settings). It crashed after a couple of minutes when I tried to record on the new 720 High settings. It crashed when I tried to watch previous recordings. 

It has now stopped rebooting. I guess it has worked things out - flushed out any inconsistent settings somewhere (life TV buffer or whatever). So I am happy, but I am unsure if the image quality has improved.

I have a Standard Definition STB (free-to-air digital TV) that sends input to the TiVo using RGBS (SCART) and the TiVo sends its RGBS (SCART) signal to an LCD TV (1366x768) via a RGBS to Component converter. 

My questions are:

1. How can I be sure that a recording is made on Mode 0 (720x568)? The recording says High (as configured) but I would like some secondary confirmation that it is Mode 0. I am using VBR so I don't think I would see huge files. 

2. I set the DefaultLiveRecordQuality from 100 to 75, hoping that it would now make Live-TV work at Mode 0 (since 75 corresponded to the High settings). How can I confirm this? TiVo still suggests it is recording at Best. Is this possible?

Thanks in advance for any information and suggestions. If I can get this to work I will be one happy camper. Currently, on what I think is Mode 0, I am seeing no flashes and no artifacts.

It's a great picture but I would like to know for sure that it is not just the great picture we previously got on Best quality. 

Cheers,
Ashley.

--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia


----------



## blindlemon

If you look in the TVLOG just after changing channels on Live TV or starting a Mode 0 recording you should see a message with the phrase "using VBR, bitrate 4800000, maxBitrate 9000000". 

If you see "using CBR, bitrate 5960000, maxBitrate 5960000" then you're not using Mode 0. 

BTW, I assume your bitrate of 90000009 above was a typo?


----------



## mrhatken

Many thanks Blindlemon!

That tip helped me see that I wasn't even experiencing Mode 0 - I should have used DBS rather than CATV (I think).

Do others see a few crashes (3-4) after making changes? But then things settle down and I've had no problems since (no flashes yet, or lip sync problems).

And yes, that was a typo (but thanks for pointing it out).

Cheers,
Ashley.


----------



## 10203

mrhatken said:


> Do others see a few crashes (3-4) after making changes? But then things settle down and I've had no problems since (no flashes yet, or lip sync problems).


I didn't get any reboots directly after changing mine. Usually my TiVo reboots are due to TiVoWeb searches producing too many results or, like yesterday, when I rebooted to enable the latest version of cachecard drivers.


----------



## davisa

Hi all.

Look, I don't normally do this, but after reading 11 pages worth of posts in this thread I'm totally confused and rather overwhelmed by so much information!

I've got Cable (Telewest) and want to try to improve the recording quality of TiVo from the default setup. I'm not bothered about mode 0 though as any sound slip or white flashes would drive me mad.

Can anyone suggest some sensisble settings to try to give a general improvement - particually for transferring on to DVD? I know many suggestions have been posted before - I just need a few pointers!


----------



## iankb

Do not assume that you will get white flashes and sound sync problems. I am using Mode-0 VBR with 'bobones settings', and this gives me DVD resolutions, 50% space saving, very, very rare white flashes, and no sound sync problems at all. It seems to depend on your hardware, as to what you will experience.


----------



## davisa

iankb said:


> Do not assume that you will get white flashes and sound sync problems. I am using Mode-0 VBR with 'bobones settings', and this gives me DVD resolutions, 50% space saving, very, very rare white flashes, and no sound sync problems at all. It seems to depend on your hardware, as to what you will experience.


Thanks, I will dig out 'bobones settings' and give it a try.

I _hated _ having to ask the question as I knew it had allready been answered so thanks for the reply.


----------



## swuk

I spent hours pouring through various threads to make sure I was doing the right thing. Like you, I'm using Telewest digital, and in the end I changed the DBSBest settings to mode 0, and upped the MaxRate to 9,000,000. (I think I changed the other rate as well, but I'm not at home now so can't check - sorry I'll check on this and edit over the w/e) And that was it. I left all the quality settings the same. I don't get lip sync issues nor white flashes.


----------



## tivo_boj

I changed to mode 0 4800000, 9000000 , and get more than flashes, I get some of the main picture flashing up at the bottom of the screen. Not usable at all. Left settings the same but changes to mode 4. all OK

What are the best non mode 0 setting for best, high. medium and basic?


----------



## blindlemon

I make most of my recordings at 3660000/6000000, Mode 0 and hardly ever get white flashes, so that might be worth a try. 

Out of interest, what's your program source? Aerial, or BBC channels on freeview seem to be the worst for triggering white flashes, IME.


----------



## tivo_boj

Changed all the settings ( ie CATV, Aerial etc,)and was worse off freeview, but was not good for any. Even live TV ( which I beleive uses best) was bad.

I will try the lower settings, but it looks like my encoder/decoder is specfically bad as some of the High and Medium recording also showed the problem.


----------



## tivo_boj

Tried3660000/6000000, Mode 0, and looks OK from Sky, but freeview (RF) still have flickers every 5-10 secs, but much much better. BBC2 the worse followed by BBC1

What were the original settings for all 4 , as I may try then at Mode 0 and work back from there. 

What about going for CBR for Best (ie Max. and min the same) mode 0 - would this improve things. Want the best Mode 0 setting so I can re-use the recording ( if you know what I mean)


----------



## davisa

Well I've done the deed and used the 'Bobones' settings for mode 0 and VBR. I set Top Gear on High (3200000-7000000 mode 0) and sat down to watch via component on my Sanyo projector projected onto a 7 foot glass bead screen - expecting a magnificent result the like of which I've never seen on TiVo before  Well, it looks absolutely terrible! Loads of MPEG artefacts and really severe colour banding  The old 'High' setting was 3660000 CBR mode 2. I just don't understand why that would be better- unless Top Gear was particularly badly filmed.

Anyway, set The Last Detective on 'Best' so i'll see if that's any better.

Confused to say the least.

(oh, didn't notice any white flashes or lip-sync issues)


----------



## iankb

If you're really aiming for large-screen quality, rather than DVD resolution and space-saving, then you will need to use CBR. The main reason for wanting DVD resolution is not so much for quality, but to speed up the creation of DVD-based 'archives'.

There are one or two users on this forum who have been experimenting with high bit rates and CBR.


----------



## Dougal

I'm new to all this bit rate and resolution stuff so have just trawled through this thread to try to educate myself  

Having read through all this I have a couple of questions that would help my understanding:

1) What is the native broadcast resolution of a widescreen (16:9) and standard (4:3) programme. For optimum quality v disc space compromise, shouldn't we be choosing a resolution close to the broadcast resolution of widescreen?

2) So, if you record a widescreen programme on TiVo using a low resolution, when you play it back does the mpeg decoder automatically interpolate to fill the screen?

Aside:
3) Believe it or not I have only just bought a 16:9 TV having had the same 4:3 TV for the last 10 years  Judging by the TV's auto-format change it seems that most analogue aerial broadcasts are still only 4:3. Is this so?

Thanks


----------



## sanderton

Dougal said:


> 1) What is the native broadcast resolution of a widescreen (16:9) and standard (4:3) programme. For optimum quality v disc space compromise, shouldn't we be choosing a resolution close to the broadcast resolution of widescreen?


It varies from system to system and even from channel to channel, but most is 720 x 576.

Since it goes through anloguie there's no advantage from matching that per se.



> 2) So, if you record a widescreen programme on TiVo using a low resolution, when you play it back does the mpeg decoder automatically interpolate to fill the screen?


Sort of. "Interpolate" isn't the right word, as the output is analogue.

Widescreen and 4:3 recodings are entirely identical, except for the widescreen flag.



> Aside:
> 3) Believe it or not I have only just bought a 16:9 TV having had the same 4:3 TV for the last 10 years  Judging by the TV's auto-format change it seems that most analogue aerial broadcasts are still only 4:3. Is this so?
> 
> Thanks


All analogue TV is broadcast 4:3; widecreen originals are sometimes letterboxed ina 4:3 frame though to 16:9 or the vile 14:9.


----------



## GarySargent

Time to resurrect this huge thread after reading through it - took a while!

Can someone tell me where abouts (the path) in MFS these resources are? I don't have TiVoWeb installed and so I just want to change them via the tivosh shell.

Thanks.


----------



## mrtickle

It seems to be one of the ResourceGroups in /SwSystem/ACTIVE . the TiVoweb code loops through them all and provides a menu with Constants, Bitrates and AltBitrates - then you edit BitRates. To be honest I think it would be easier to install TiVoweb and use the Resoure Editor module than to work out where it is below /SwSystem/ACTIVE. (I've just tried for a few minutes and given up!)


----------



## GarySargent

No network card in this TiVo so TiVoWeb is not an option.

I can see resource strings in those ResourceGroup areas that look like the kind of values for the bitrates, but there is no string like "Resolution" or "MAXBitrate" etc associated with them. Where does TiVoWeb get those strings from as they don't seem to be in the same place.


----------



## GarySargent

Ah I see - tvres-2.5.res has the mappings from nice names to position in ResourceGroup.

Should be able to work it out I think.

What is the difference between the "Bitrates" and "AltBitrates" groups?


----------



## blindlemon

Hi Gary, 

Here's a TCL script that does it for you 

I've included LJ's fixed fpga module too.


----------



## GarySargent

Aha excellent - was just thinking of writing such a script, you saved me the bother


----------



## 6022tivo

Call me stupid

FTP the two files in the zip above

Chmodded and ran, got the message as below.

Now what???

Should I have put the fpga file somewhere else, or did the script do this??

Can I delete the two files from the var/hack now they have been worked omn??

Should I have a module running in tivoweb or something? I did have one refering to bitrates, but moved it from the modules folder?. Should I have a look for it and put it back.

So now when I select BEST, is this mode 0??

How can I tell?

Cheers for any forcoming help?

_bash-2.02#
bash-2.02# chmod 755 setupMode0.tcl
bash-2.02#
bash-2.02# ./setupMode0.tcl
Resources set to Mode 0 (Option 1) values
bash-2.02#
bash-2.02#_


----------



## GarySargent

The setup TCL script is a one time thing.

Follow the instructions here to install the fpga file: http://www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/tivo_fpga.html

You might want to follow the instructions in this post which tweaks the colour and luminance by a mod to the startup file: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?postid=1401427#post1401427

iicset utility referenced in that post is in the attached ZIP.


----------



## 6022tivo

I have found the Resource module for tivoweb, but get 

INTERNAL SERVER ERROR
--cut here--
action_resources '/' ''


when selected??. 

Ideas??

How reading the fpga page, cheers.


----------



## GarySargent

Attached is my modified TCL script which has some extra methods. One to reset to default values, another to set BEST quality acording to bobones defaults, and another to dump out all current values.

(Edit the last line in the file to call the right function!)


----------



## GarySargent

Don't forget to reboot!


----------



## 6022tivo

Hmmmm, having issues

_*bash-2.02#
bash-2.02# chmod 755 setupMode0.tcl
bash-2.02#
bash-2.02# ./setupMode0.tcl
bash: ./setupMode0.tcl: No such file or directory
bash-2.02#
bash-2.02# setupMode0.tcl
bash: /var/hack/setupMode0.tcl: No such file or directory
bash-2.02#
bash-2.02#*_*

I checked binary mode??. I will try again.

Also don't understand the edit the last line bit, I did check the file re bones?*


----------



## GarySargent

Might be a windows/dos line endings thing?

Try ftping just the TCL file using ASCII transfer mode.

The TCL script I posted has a few different functions, and the last line calls one of them. That's what I was talking about.


----------



## 6022tivo

I have tried it again Gary, have just overwritten with the one posted yesterday and that installs ok... I will restart as the tivo is struggling anyways, does the ZIP you posted extract and work ok for you??


----------



## GarySargent

I think it was probably in Windows line end mode not UNIX. I've converted it and uploaded again in the post above.

Without modification, the script will reset to UK defaults, then set the BEST quality to be mode 0 using bobones settings.


----------



## 6022tivo

Still having the same problem, the file in the zip for me is the same size date and time as the first, so maybe a local NTL cache problem, I will try again later. Cheers.

Ok, now time changed, and ran ok.

A reboot fixed the tivoweb issue.

Now I have the extra options in the bitrates section of tivoweb (bobones), and you have answered my next question about how do you select mode 0, as you choose best, ok nice.

Will update if I notice a difference, thank you for your time.


----------



## mrtickle

GarySargent said:


> What is the difference between the "Bitrates" and "AltBitrates" groups?


I think it is for "tuner 1" and "tuner 2" where tuner 2 is DirecTivo, or possibly "lineup 1" and "lineup 2" (eg Sky+Freeview lineups)?


----------



## mrtickle

GarySargent said:


> No network card in this TiVo so TiVoWeb is not an option.


Actually it is with a £5 serial cable and PPP which is how I used it for around a year


----------



## blindlemon

AltBitrates are used when you select "video smoothing" in the TiVo UI.


----------



## 6022tivo

Hi

I did the fpga and the script from Gary's post above.

The picture looks a little closer to the AUX bypass picture, but I think the brightness or contrast is too high??? 

Can some options in the bitrates or something be change to improve this??


----------



## Lysander

The colour and brightness is altered using the iicset command. Gary included the link to that thread at the top of this page.

HTH

James


----------



## blindlemon

Read the thread backwards too - the alternative iicset (iicsetw) attached near the end is less likely to crash your TiVo than iicset


----------



## GarySargent

Looks like I didn't upload iicset anyway - must have picked the wrong file!


----------



## 6022tivo

I must admit, I could not find it in the thread.

Anyways I did a search and found the iicsetw, it worked a treat, have settings of 19 and 20 (I think). It does make a big difference to me. 

Many thanks.


----------



## sanderton

Yes you did Gary - I used it!


----------



## GarySargent

I think when I tried to overwrite the setup TCL script I overwrote the post with the iicset in not the one I intended to - which also explains why 6022tivo still couldn't get the script working!


----------



## surrey lad

I've spent the last 4-5hrs reading through these forums and I just can't find simple step by step instructions anywhere  



6022tivo said:


> I must admit, I could not find it in the thread.
> 
> Anyways I did a search and found the iicsetw, it worked a treat, have settings of 19 and 20 (I think). It does make a big difference to me.


How did you actually load/install iicsetw, and don't say using a computer!! 

Also can someone please explain, (in laymen's terms  ) Exactly how do you go about reinstalling /var/hack/*setrgb.sh*

BTW, my tivo is on our home network. Just!

surrey lad


----------



## surrey lad

Anyone!!  

The problem I have is that my TiVo was working fine with a preconfigured mode0/iicsetw drive but for what ever reason I lost the /hack partition. Ive been told that this happens sometimes if the TiVo is restarted unexpectedly. 

Ive managed to restore the bin, setup, mytools, scripts and tivoweb-tcl partitions within /hack using tivo255Generic.hack.tar.gz but it doesnt contain /setrgb.sh and I cant for the life of me work out how to restore this with the iicsetw settings

Last night (after much digging around on these forums, great forum lads!!) I managed to check if mode0 was still running by examining the tvlog and by the looks of it all is fine there.

I then examined the kernel log and found that rc.sysinit is requesting /var/hack/setrgb.sh and then says that directory does not exist. Ive now reinstated the /setrgb.sh folder but I dont know what to put in it.  

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.


----------



## mike0151

From the command you have posted (and the suffix), setrgb.sh is a script file, not a directory. I haven't tried mode 0 so I can't help further with the contents of the script.

Mike


----------



## blindlemon

Setrgb.sh varies from machine to machine, but the basic script just calls iicset (or now iicsetw) to change the RGB parameters.

I have attached a sample script that should be FTP'd to /var/hack and made executable with chmod 755. There is no need for a directory called setrgb.sh

You may want to change the values (I've used 20 and 21) to suit your setup - in which case I would recommend editing the file in-situ on the TiVo using joe.


----------



## surrey lad

Many Thanks

I'll give this a go when I get home tonight


----------



## surrey lad

Hmmm!


Oct 5 23:09:36 (none) kernel: eth0: unknown interface. 
Oct 5 23:09:51 (none) kernel: setrgb.sh: adjust RGB input 38=luminance 
Oct 5 23:09:51 (none) kernel: /var/hack/setrgb.sh: /var/hack/bin/iicsetw: No such file or directory 
Oct 5 23:09:56 (none) kernel: setrgb.sh: adjust RGB input 39=colour 
Oct 5 23:09:56 (none) kernel: /var/hack/setrgb.sh: /var/hack/bin/iicsetw: No such file or directory 
Oct 5 23:09:56 (none) kernel: setrgb.sh: Finished 



After all that looks like iicsetw wasn't installed after all


----------



## blindlemon

I included a link to it in my previous post 

Just FTP it to /var/hack/bin and make executable with chmod 755.


----------



## surrey lad

Thanks, I do appreciate all the help.  

I must be doing something wrong.

Last night I downloaded on to my desktop and unzipped the iicsetw.zip file.

Using smartftp (in binary mode) I uploaded the iicsetw file to var/hack/bin/.

I then via telnet typed

rw

cd /var/hack/bin/

chmod 755 iicsetw

ro

reboot

Am I doing something wrong here??


----------



## blindlemon

It sounds like you have done all you need to.

If you list /var/hack/bin with *ls -l* what output do you see?


----------



## surrey lad

I'm at work at the moment so I can't check



blindlemon said:


> If you list /var/hack/bin with *ls -l* what output do you see?


Sorry to be a pain but exactly what do you mean re the above


----------



## blindlemon

cd / var/hack/bin
ls -l


----------



## surrey lad

Thanks Doc!

TiVo: {/var/tmp} % cd / var/hack/bin
TiVo: {/} % ls -l
total 30
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Sep 20 10:44 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 3072 Dec 5 2003 dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 dist
drwxr-xr-x 4 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 etccombo
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 initrd
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 install
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 kernel
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 1024 Sep 20 10:44 lib
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 12288 Dec 5 2003 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 mnt
dr-xr-xr-x 4 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 proc
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 prom
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Sep 20 10:44 sbin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 0 0 8 Dec 5 2003 tmp -> /var/tmp
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 2048 Dec 5 2003 tvbin
drwxr-xr-x 7 0 0 1024 Dec 5 2003 tvlib
drwxr-xr-x 12 0 0 1024 Jan 1 1970 var
TiVo: {/} %

Now i'm really lost!!!

I'm gonna try and upload iicsetw again, see what happens.


----------



## Fozzie

Hehe, there's a typo from blindlemon. You should have typed:

cd /var/hack/bin (then ls -l)


----------



## surrey lad

350 Restart okay, awaiting file retrieval request.
PWD
257 "/" is current directory.
CWD /var/hack/bin
550 Directory change failed; permission denied.
CWD /var/hack/bin
550 Directory change failed; permission denied.

Trying to upload iicsetw using smartftp I get the following message??


----------



## Fozzie

Do a:

cd /var/hack
ls -l


----------



## sanderton

Same problem as Carl. Is there a script doing the rounds which sets that directory up wrongly?

This is what I get:



> 257 "/" is current directory.
> PORT 192,168,0,125,5,236
> 200 PORT command successful.
> LIST -aL
> 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list.
> 226 Transfer complete.
> 1131 bytes transferred. (2.35 KB/s) (469 ms)
> CWD /var
> 250 Directory change successful.
> PWD
> 257 "/var" is current directory.
> PORT 192,168,0,125,5,237
> 200 PORT command successful.
> LIST -aL
> 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list.
> 226 Transfer complete.
> 1412 bytes transferred. (2.75 KB/s) (500 ms)
> CWD /var/bin
> 250 Directory change successful.
> PWD
> 257 "/var/bin" is current directory.


----------



## surrey lad

Thanks Guys!

-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 49164 Oct 1 02:30 od
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 31448 Oct 1 02:30 paste
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 28448 Oct 1 02:30 pathchk
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 48024 Oct 1 02:30 pr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 25184 Oct 1 02:30 rarp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 27452 Oct 1 02:30 rmdir
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 50016 Oct 1 02:30 sort
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 33612 Oct 1 02:30 split
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 130308 Oct 1 02:30 strace
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 46684 Oct 1 02:30 su
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 28932 Oct 1 02:30 sum
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 32848 Oct 1 02:30 tac
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 39480 Oct 1 02:30 tail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 241690 Oct 1 02:30 tar
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 28284 Oct 1 02:30 tee
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 43980 Oct 1 02:30 touch
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 44748 Oct 1 02:30 tr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 26716 Oct 1 02:30 tty
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 27256 Oct 1 02:30 uname
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 31196 Oct 1 02:30 unexpand
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 33304 Oct 1 02:30 uniq
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 29208 Oct 1 02:30 uptime
-rwxr-xr-x 1 37330 4000 29940 Oct 1 02:30 wc
TiVo: {/var/hack/bin} %

This is a different world to me.


----------



## Fozzie

And from my last post?

cd /var/hack
ls -l


----------



## surrey lad

Fozzie said:


> And from my last post?
> 
> cd /var/hack
> ls -l


File system on / is now READ/WRITE - type 'ro' to reset to READONLY
TiVo: {/var/hack/bin} % cd /var/bin
TiVo: {/var/bin} % chmod 755 iicsetw
TiVo: {/var/bin} % ro
File system on / is now READONLY - type 'rw' to make READ/WRITE
TiVo: {/var/bin} % cd /var/hack
TiVo: {/var/hack} % ls -l
total 3789
drwx------ 2 37330 4000 1024 Oct 1 02:30 bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 21380 Oct 6 19:02 iicsetw
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 256000 Oct 1 02:30 joe.tar
-rw-rw-rw- 1 500 506 17169 Oct 1 02:30 joerc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 349656 Oct 1 02:30 nic_config_tivo
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 10936 Oct 1 02:30 readme.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Oct 1 02:30 scripts
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 216 Oct 5 19:55 setrgb.sh
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Oct 1 02:30 setup
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 2693120 Oct 1 02:30 tbin.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 45 Oct 1 02:30 tivo255Generic.hack.tar.g
z
drwxrwsr-x 5 1000 1000 1024 Oct 1 03:36 tivoweb-tcl
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 501760 Oct 1 02:30 tivoweb-tcl-1.9.4.tar
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 1024 Oct 1 02:30 tytools
TiVo: {/var/hack} %

I've just uploaded to var/bin to see if that made a difference. The wife is watching tivo at the mo so I can't reboot. I'll soon send her to bed


----------



## sanderton

No need for the ro / rw stuff - /var is always read-write.


----------



## blindlemon

OK, so now you have iicsetw in /var/hack you just need to move it to /var/hack/bin :-

In telnet, 

cd /var/hack
mv iicsetw bin
cd bin
ls -l


----------



## blindlemon

sanderton said:


> Is there a script doing the rounds which sets that directory up wrongly?


Stuart,

They have both used tw_setup  which is what I use to install TiVoWeb and the TiVo binaries etc. The /var/hack/bin directory is created by cpio when it's extracted from tbin.tar:-



Code:


gzip -d ./tbin.tar.gz
cpio -idu -H tar < ./tbin.tar
mv tivo-bin /var/hack/bin

This results in the permissions of the bin directory being set to *drwx------* rather than *drwxr-xr-x* which is OK if you just want to execute stuff from the bin directory, and OK from a bash prompt too, but no use if you want to FTP to it.

I have uploaded a revised version that sets the directory to the 'normal' permissions with chmod 755 after it's created.


----------



## RichardJH

I am following lj's instructions for putting the new fpga file but at the point where he says to check that the new file has same size and attributes I did a ls -l and got the following


> Welcome to the wonderful world of TiVo hacking
> Filesystem on / set to READONLY - type rw to make READ/WRITE
> TiVo: {/var/tmp} % cd /lib/modules
> TiVo: {/lib/modules} %
> TiVo: {/lib/modules} % ls -l
> total 1006
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 37320 Sep 25 17:31 cachecard.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 2932 Feb 14 2002 fan.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 182112 Feb 14 2002 fpga7114.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 182112 Oct 7 10:18 fpga7114.o.original
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 182112 Oct 7 10:27 fpga7114.o_lj_20030922
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 182112 Feb 14 2002 fpga7114_p15.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 23068 Feb 14 2002 fpgacombo.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 16556 Feb 14 2002 i2c.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 9276 Feb 14 2002 ideturbo.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 10716 Feb 14 2002 mixaud.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 40920 Feb 14 2002 oslink.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 87840 Feb 14 2002 pxmpegdecode.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 7128 Feb 14 2002 scartmux.o
> -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 2932 Feb 14 2002 therm.o
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 21340 Sep 25 17:31 turbonet2.o
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 24960 Sep 25 17:31 turbonet2_debug.o
> TiVo: {/lib/modules} %
> TiVo: {/lib/modules} %


The attributes shown for the new file do not match the old before I go on to the next step can someone tell me how to alter the attributes or are they OK as is


----------



## blindlemon

Richard,

If that's one of my drives then you already have the correct file 

If not, then to make it the same as the original, type

*rw*
*chmod 644 fpga7114.o_lj_20030922*

(You don't actually need to change the attributes though as leaving it marked executable won't cause any problems.)


----------



## surrey lad

surrey lad said:


> 350 Restart okay, awaiting file retrieval request.
> PWD
> 257 "/" is current directory.
> CWD /var/hack/bin
> 550 Directory change failed; permission denied.
> CWD /var/hack/bin
> 550 Directory change failed; permission denied.
> 
> Trying to upload iicsetw using smartftp I get the following message??


Hi mate,

I'll try moving it across tonight, if it allows me to!

After moving the iicset file across would I then still have to chmod it??

These forums remind me of 'Eastenders', a great community spirit


----------



## blindlemon

According to the listing in post #378 it is already marked executable, so no.

You might want to make the bin directory executable/readable etc. though to make it easier to FTP stuff directly to it in future:-

*cd /var/hack
chmod 755 bin
*


----------



## RichardJH

Thanks Blindlemon that was easy  and wow mode 0 is great. Now it is hack on some more


----------



## surrey lad

Thanks 

Hopefully this should be it, what a week, what a learning curve!!  

No more boring the wife with my reboots. No more late nights. No more over sleeping. No more getting to work late


----------



## surrey lad

:up: sorted

A BIG thanks to Blindlemon and all you other guys for all your help!!


----------



## smiffy

Silly Mode 0 Recording Questions.

In the TiVo resouce editor, presumably I set the fields

DBSBestResolution = 0 (was 4)
DBSBestVBRBitrate = 8000000 (from 5960000)
DBSBestMAXBitrate = 8000000 (from 5960000)

and then once I've rebooted and installed the LJ patch all future BEST resordings will be Mode 0


Second question is regarding these settings on the TivoHeaven website - would I be correct in thinking that these revised modes have the Mode 0 resolution, but at the lower quality (bitrates)?

Best : Mode 0, 7500000/9000000, RQ 100
High: Mode 0, 3660000/6000000, RQ 75
Med: Mode 0, 2500000/5960000, RQ 55
Basic: Mode 1, 1700000/2000000, RQ 0

Third question - Is there an easy way to tell if its worked?


----------



## blindlemon

If you are using Sky as your source then you need to change the DBSxxxx bitrate fields, if Freeview the CATVxxxx and if Aerial the Rooftopxxxx.

If you set Best for your source to 8000000/8000000 then you will be assumed to be trying to disable VBR, and the TiVo software will use CBR mode instead, regardless of what you specify with the "save disc space" menu option.

The three modes (best,high,med) described as "Mode 0" are Mode 0. The lower bitrates of High and Medium will increase the amount of pixellation on fast moving scenes and reduce, to some extent, the subjective "smoothness" of the picture. Even though it is Mode 0, Medium won't be as sharp as High or Best as the TiVo software only allows 2 recording qualities out of the available 4 to be "sharp". However, I prefer the look of Mode 0, Medium to the the look of the default Mode 1, Medium, which is why I use it.

To check that you are using the bitrates and VBR/CBR setting you want (although you can't check the "mode") have a look in the *tvlog* logfile just after starting a recording or changing channels in Live TV. You should see a line similar to the following with the bitrates of the selected quality:-



> Oct 23 16:50:00 (none) TmkMediaswitch::Trace[151]: using VBR, bitRate=7500000, maxBitRate=9000000


----------



## mrtickle

smiffy said:


> Silly Mode 0 Recording Questions.
> 
> In the TiVo resouce editor, presumably I set the fields
> 
> DBSBestResolution = 0 (was 4)
> DBSBestVBRBitrate = 8000000 (from 5960000)
> DBSBestMAXBitrate = 8000000 (from 5960000)
> 
> and then once I've rebooted and installed the LJ patch all future BEST resordings will be Mode 0


One other thing (because you haven't mentioned it) - after pressing Enter on each setting before you reboot you need to click the "update resources" link otherwise it'll all be lost.



> Third question - Is there an easy way to tell if its worked?


See blindlemon's answer. Also look for a very obviously clearer picture on Live Tv. Also go back into the Resource Editor and see if your values are still there


----------



## smiffy

> Oct 23 16:50:00 (none) TmkMediaswitch::Trace[151]: using VBR, bitRate=7500000, maxBitRate=9000000


I seem to be getting



> Oct 26 14:20:11 (none) TmkMediaswitch::Trace[142]: Lost VBI lock


Which strikes me as a little worrying!


----------



## iankb

smiffy said:


> Which strikes me as a little worrying!


I get 'Lost VBI Lock' all the time, but it doesn't seem to cause me any problems.


----------



## blindlemon

Yes, 'Lost VBI lock" is quite normal. 

Do a search through the log for the strings "VBR" or "CBR" and you will find the lines you are interested in.


----------



## 6022tivo

Enough is enough...

Got to get rid of the white/green flashes.

It maybe to do with my HDD starting to fail, getting more and more stalls now??. And tivoweb and menu's are getting really slow..

Anyways my current settings are.

VBR 7500000
MAX 9000000

I don't really understand these values??. I am hoping that reducing them slightly will get rid of the flashes??

Should I reduce them say both by 20%??? and see how it goes?. 


Can someone also explain what VBR/CBR is??


----------



## Heuer

Flashes are caused by the TiVo MPEG convertor which is not the best available. Mode 0 pushes it beyond its design parameters and is probably why 'Best' is set at 4 by the designers. The amount of flashing varies by individual TiVo because of the build tolerances.

CBR = Constant Bit Rate
VBR = Variable Bit Rate

You only need to use VBR if you want to save disk space and ease transfer from TiVo to DVD. For ultimate quality you need to go for as high a 'Max Bit Rate' as possible, consistent with not stressing the MPEG convertor, and use CBR.

So to reduce the flashes go for CBR, Mode 0 and set the Max bit rate to a high value - 9000000 is a good place to start. Reduce this by 1000000 at a time until you arrive at a point where the flashes stop. You can then start incrementing the bit rate by smaller units until you find the cut off point for your TiVo. You may find this reduces your disk space so you can switch on VBR with a lower Min Bit Rate (typically 2000000 less than the Max). This will not affect the flashing, simply makes more efficient use of the disk. Do this via TivoWeb and remember to hit return after each change and 'Update'. You may also need to reboot.

In my experience the flashes seem to be worse on BBC stations and during dark scenes. Small price to pay for the increase in picture quality but it can be annoying.


----------



## sanderton

I found switching from CBR to VBR reduced the flashes to a managable level.


----------



## Heuer

VBR will reduce the flashes as it will use the lower bit rate when appropriate - but it will not get rid of them. CBR will use the bit rate you set, so by cranking it down to the point where flashes disappear you will find the Max bit rate for your TiVo. You can then switch on VBR and set a lower bit rate to take advantage of smaller files.

If you use a scaler you can alter the picture size slightly so the flashes are off screen at the expense of a few lines at the bottom.


----------



## sanderton

Because the flashes only occur every few seconds, and becuase VBR typically only maintains peak bitrate for a very short time, I think you can get a higher peak and average bitrate with an acceptable while flash count that way.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it!


----------



## thechachman

Must be lucky, using the patched fpga file and running with the below for about a year with no issues ...

DBSBestVBRBitrate	7680000
DBSBestMAXBitrate	9900000
DBSBestResolution	0


----------



## mrtickle

Heuer said:


> So to reduce the flashes go for CBR, Mode 0 and set the Max bit rate to a high value - 9000000 is a good place to start. Reduce this by 1000000 at a time until you arrive at a point where the flashes stop. You can then start incrementing the bit rate by smaller units until you find the cut off point for your TiVo. You may find this reduces your disk space so you can switch on VBR with a lower Min Bit Rate (typically 2000000 less than the Max). This will not affect the flashing, simply makes more efficient use of the disk.


Interesting method! It hadn't occured to me to find the cut off point for my TiVo.  . Don't the flashes depend on the video content though, making testing difficult?



> Do this via TivoWeb and remember to hit return after each change and 'Update'. You may also need to reboot.


Yes you do also need to reboot every time you change the bitrates. The "update" page in TiVoweb hints at this


----------



## Heuer

mrtickle said:


> Interesting method! It hadn't occured to me to find the cut off point for my TiVo.  . Don't the flashes depend on the video content though, making testing difficult?


Indeed, so the trick is to use a recorded programme that produces flashes and keep repeating.

Having said all this I use VBR and:

DBSBestVBRBitrate 7680000
DBSBestMAXBitrate 9000000
DBSBestResolution 0

My response was only to help 6022tivo who said 'enough is enough' and wanted rid of the flashes!


----------



## sanderton

I use 

DBSBestVBRBitrate 7500000
DBSBestMAXBitrate 9000000
DBSBestResolution 0

With an entirely acceptable level of flashing.


----------



## 6022tivo

I have reduced it today, but still flashing, like a green pixelation... Does not look so bad. 

My cache card is arriving next week, and a different Tivo and HDD will be in its place, with the current one moving rooms. So this may improve things.

I really notice it on the bedroom TV.
Setup is TiVo in widescreen for the lounge TV, piped up to the bedroom via RF. 
TV in bedroom has been "Modded" was standard 4:3, I have been inside and squashed the display and moved it up to the top of the CRT so the teletext lines have gone. So the bottom third of the screen is blank, gives a widescreen aspect so things are not squashed up.

Now because of this I really notice the white flashes at the bottom, more than most people I suppose, and that is what I am trying to get rid of.

Anyways, will keep trying and hope the other tivo is a little better at managing this. 

For me it appears a lot worse whilst recording BBC1 and especially Eastenders..


----------



## iankb

I use 4,800,000 / 9,000,000 / 0 for Best with my 32" Sony TV.

It will go months between flashes.


----------



## blindlemon

6022tivo said:


> For me it appears a lot worse whilst recording BBC1 and especially Eastenders..


I don't know about Eastenders as I never watch it, but all BBC channels tend to be worse for white flashes, IME.

I think it's something to do with the digital sharpening they apply to the signal, which makes the picture slightly grainy. IMHO this is what trips up the MPEG decoder as it tries to keep up with millions of tiny dots everywhere as opposed to the larger smooth areas you get with other digital channels.


----------



## stevelup

Hi

I reckon film grain is a major cause of the white flashes as it is completely impossible to encode efficiently.

I find the flashing most noticible on dark scenes, and this is probably more to do with the fact that the picture is often noisier on the dark scenes.

I stuck a PC northbridge cooler fan on the MPEG decoder chip and I believe this has helped. I haven't done any scientific test but subjectively it has improved the situation.

Steve


----------



## blindlemon

Interesting.... 

What about noise from the fan?


----------



## stevelup

blindlemon said:


> Interesting....
> 
> What about noise from the fan?


It's a 12V fan but I'm running it off the 5V rail so it's running slowly.

It's less noisy than the drives. I can't notice whether it's on or off.

Steve


----------



## sanderton

The BBC thing may be that they run at higher bitrates in the broacast, so have more detail; the softer pics on other channels may encode/decode more easily.


----------



## blindlemon

Very possible, but I think they do tend to be a bit "sharpened" looking as well. 

There are definitely some tiny grainy artefacts that look like digital sharpening if you look closely - and these must be a nightmare (a bit like an RF signal) for the MPEG decoder.


----------



## sanderton

Have you tried turning on the noise reduction option in the menus, intended for exactly that?


----------



## blindlemon

All that does is use the 'alternate' set of bitrates AFAIK, so no. 

Although if you know any more I'd be interested to hear about it...


----------



## blindlemon

stevelup said:


> It's a 12V fan but I'm running it off the 5V rail so it's running slowly.


What fan did you use? Could you post a link?


----------



## Heuer

Although not the one referred to I have used these with some success: http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/fan.htm

You can probably get away with a suitably sized CPU heatsink glued to the chip. Spot of thermal jelly in the middle and four spots of superglue in the corners should do the trick. Doubt you need to go as far as a dedicated fan though. The TiVo motherboard runs fairly cool with most of the heat coming from the HD.

Interesting idea though about the MPEG chip being heat sensitive - could go some way to explaining why the flashing is intermittent. Lots in summer, few in winter? Never thought to check!


----------



## Fred1

Thanks for this info. I was just about to jump in and find the threshold for my encoder chip, but it hasnt really been flashing this week. Then I noticed the bit about cooling and as my Tivo is very cool at the moment (see extract from Daily mail below), this may explain it.

TiVo temperature is 29C / 84.2F (Running cool -- the case must be open).

I think I might try a heatsink before setting the optimum level. 

Does anyone else have any evidence that the encoder chip is heat sensive at the edges of its design performance?


----------



## Lysander

The heat thing intrigued me, so I bought a Northbridge heatsink and thermal glue from quietpc.com. Glued it on the IBM MPEG Decoder chip this morning and have told the kids to look out for white flashes. Will post if I see any - although none so far.

Cheers,

James


----------



## 6022tivo

I have gone back to 9000000 and 7500000, was noticing some softness on the TV.

It was still flashing.. Now after much research, it is really only on BBC1 I notice it... 
Understand from previous replies it is probably due to the BBC's compression. Also may be something to do with NTL's transmission if others don't have this problem?


----------



## Heuer

I have Sky and I only see flashing on BBC1 and BBC2 (rarely). Only happens on dark video segments and especially where the dark part is in the lower part of the screen.

I will be interested to see if the heatsink works though.


----------



## mrtickle

It is something to do with black I'm sure. It used to happen in the end titles when the BBC showed "24". Probably happened with "Extras" too...


----------



## MikeMcr

Lysander said:


> The heat thing intrigued me, so I bought a Northbridge heatsink and thermal glue from quietpc.com. Glued it on the IBM MPEG Decoder chip this morning and have told the kids to look out for white flashes. Will post if I see any - although none so far.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> James


Did the heatsink fix the white flashes problem; have you seen any since?


----------



## markabuckley

Well I did the Mode 0 tweak the other day, and it is a noticeable improvement, better resolution and less colour bleed - BUT I do get the flashes, quite often, using 8MB bit-rate.

It doesn't really distract fom watching programs, and my wife hasn't mentionned it yet, so it can't be that noticeable.

Has anyone modded the FPGA file to have even lower contrast and colour, as still a lot more saturated, and much more contrasty than "AUX".

Thanks, Mark.


----------



## blindlemon

For some reason corrections to contrast/saturation in the fpga file don't seem to have any effect.

However, using iicsetw to tweak the registers during startup works fine - as this monster thread illustrates


----------



## markabuckley

I read that thread a while back - but got a bit too technical for me - I'm not entirely sure what I need to do with iicsetw to get it to work ? I thought iicset only worked until you changed channel ? Also the "crashing" part put me off- my wife would kill me if I ended up crashing the TIVO just before Christmas, or is it always recoverable ?

Thaks, M ark.


----------



## cashew1970

I have looked at this thread for some time now, and have finaly decided that I need to take the plunge and have a play with the Mode 0 settings.

I have searched for the Bobones Settings that are mentioned in the thread, and can't seem to find them....

Does anyone have these to hand.... or a nice simple HOW to??

Cheers... and Happy New Year to you all

Martin


----------



## Lysander

MikeMcr said:


> Did the heatsink fix the white flashes problem; have you seen any since?


Still getting occasional white flashes, I would suggest it makes little difference.


----------



## AMc

Just to back up cashew1970's request. 
I now have a networked Tivo (Horrah!) but I'm still hunting for a simple guide to getting Mode 0 and VBR working.
I know there's some suck it and see with each Tivo but has anyone got a short FAQ?


----------



## pmd

cashew1970 said:


> I have looked at this thread for some time now, and have finaly decided that I need to take the plunge and have a play with the Mode 0 settings.
> 
> I have searched for the Bobones Settings that are mentioned in the thread, and can't seem to find them....
> 
> Does anyone have these to hand.... or a nice simple HOW to??
> 
> Cheers... and Happy New Year to you all
> 
> Martin


I believe the post that people refer to is #20 of the thread entitled 'Tivo picture quality help please! (I can't post the URL until I've made 5 posts, despite the fact I've been a member for over a year!)

Paul


----------



## blindlemon

AMc said:


> I'm still hunting for a simple guide to getting Mode 0 and VBR working.


OK, here goes...

1. Get networked.
2. Replace your /lib/modules/fpga7114.o file with LJ's hacked version from here.
3. Run my setupMode0 script. 
4. Reboot and enjoy Mode 0 

If you want to tinker with the bitrates etc., this can be done via the resources editor in TiVoWeb.


----------



## AMc

Oh thank you! Tinkering to be done now


----------



## cashew1970

Thanks.... Getting there now.....

worked out that I had to chmod 644 to get the correct permissions on the file from LJ

Do you have to do anything special to run the tcl script??


----------



## cashew1970

Clenched those butt cheeks and went for it...

Cant wait to get home so I can chek it out...

Hope there will be no smoke comming out of it!!!

Thanks for all the help....


----------



## cashew1970

Thanks to Blindlemon again....

All has gone smoothly, and, until the weekend when I will get a chance to play with the settings!!, is up and running fine....

Cheers

Martin


----------



## jonny m

Hi all

Can I just confirm the below, I have a networked tivo, but not installed tivoweb yet.

To enable mode 0 all I have to do is:
2. Replace your /lib/modules/fpga7114.o file with LJ's hacked version from here.
(not use the version in the zip file below?)
3. Run my setupMode0 script
chmod 644 the file to execute it
4. Reboot as normal

Does this change best to be mode 0?
If I wanted to change back to the original best setting (say the flashes really got to me) would I just rename the file back or has high become what best was previously and I could just select that instead? 

Thanks all in advance

John


----------



## cashew1970

Hi... Its the fpga file that needs to be 644 "ed" so that the permissions are as the original...

If you make a note of the current values in in the resources, then all you should do is replace them, and remae the fpga and all should be back as it was....

Pretty sure you will need tivoweb for the resouce bits...


----------



## jonny m

Hi cashew
Thanks for that, can you confirm the fga file is used to fix the problems with mode 0 (offset etc) and the script is used to change resolution.

John


----------



## Heuer

To be clear we have four steps here:

1. Enable Mode 0 via Resource Editor in TiVoweb
2. Change max/min bitrates via Resource Editor in TiVoweb
3. Switch on space saving in TiVo main menu

This will get you going with Mode 0 and VBR. There are a couple of problems that you may want to address caused by these changes, namely a green bar down the side of the screen which you need to shift and a chroma/luminance problem for which you have to address the FPGA chip. This is step four but is 'optional' to Mode 0.


----------



## jonny m

Hi Heuer
Thanks for that, I thought blindlemon's setup script negated the use of Tivoweb or are you saying is it required after all? 
Generally I prefer to do the least possible with Tivo not being very confident around linux - If I can get away without installing Tivoweb then I won't.


----------



## Heuer

No experience of Blindlemon's script as I did all my modifications via TiVoWeb. I have no doubt the script will work as described but not sure if it does all the steps outlined. Great if it does!


----------



## Cainam

Gary modified Blindlemons's original script here

You set a value in the file so that you can either set up Best as Mode 0, set it up back as the default if you cannot live with the flashes, or to dump out the current values.

Both Blindlemons and Garys scripts stop the need for TivoWeb i.e. you no longer need to enable Mode 0 or set the values in resource editor.

You still need to enable space saving manually though, as well as the thing with the fpga file to cure the right shift problem.

IIRC correctly you only needs to fix the bit about the colours and brightness if you enable RGB, which is different from setting up Mode 0 (as Heuer says)


----------



## markabuckley

They are all superb walkthroughs, I'm Mode0 enabled.

Could someone walkthrough the best "RGB" colour/brightness sub-due method please.

Thanks, Mark.


----------



## Cainam

If you enable RGB output on the Tivo menu, the colours look really bright and horrible. Some clever people worked out a fix to this using a program called iicset, but it caused some Tivo's to hang. Someone else modified the iicset program to iicsetw that seems to work much better (I have not heard of it hanging anyone's machine), so much so that I have a line in my startup file to call it. Have a look at blindlemons post here for an example.

I actually have the line

(sleep 40; /var/hack/rgb/iicsetw 0x8C 0x38 21 0x39 20) &

in my startup script which works great for me.


----------



## markabuckley

Thanks - I may try that Cainam.

If the TIVO hangs is it terminal - or can you normally boot to a point where you can remove the file ?

Lastly I take it the and at the end is not a typo.

Where would I put this in my startup script ? Beginning or end or does it not matter ?

Thanks, Mark.


----------



## jonny m

Thanks all for the info.

But now Im abit worried about the RGB thing, is this just when you enable mode 0? or do I have this at the moment as Im using RGB out from Tivo and I think its ok but I can see that its different from aux, I thought it was just the mpeg process affecting the image.


----------



## markabuckley

Jonny M - don't worry.

RGB IMO is WAY over-saturated/bright etc in all modes. If anything Mode 0 is "better" than the others colour bleed etc wise.

Mark.


----------



## Cainam

I forget the exact menu option, but there is an option in the setup to say if you want to output RGB and PAL or PAL only (I think). If you have the RGB one on, things look funny.

Your choice if you turn it on or not, completely independent from Mode 0, but if you are enabling Mode 0 for quality reasons, you might as well go for RGB!

When it crashed it WAS quite terminal, and involved a reboot. And then, after 2 or 3 reboots, it seemed to work OK. But the lastest version seems fine, and has never crashed on me.

The & at the end is correct - it forces the command to run in the background.

Mine went at the end of my startup.author.edit (or whatever it is called!) script, but I do not suppose it matters much.


----------



## markabuckley

Reboot is OK.

I presumed when people said terminal it meant complete re-blow of Hard disk.

Mark.


----------



## markabuckley

Since (sleep 40; /var/hack/rgb/iicsetw 0x8C 0x38 21 0x39 20) &

would go in startup script ...

if I just type iicsetw ......... from telnet

How long do these settings last for - till next reboot or till a channel change ?

Thanks, Mark.


----------



## blindlemon

The values changed with iicset(w) last until a reboot.

I can confirm that iicset*w* has never crashed any TiVo I've installed it on, whereas iicset used to do so with tedious regularity.

By 'terminal', I think Cainam meant that you had to reboot to clear the hang. I have never seen iicset(w) do anything more serious than hang the TiVo.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that you need to turn on VBR via the "save disc space" option. If you leave it off then the encoder will use the higher bitrate only. Also, my script only sets the resource values - you need to install LJ's modded fpga file (to fix the green line) yourself. The script as posted sets the mode and bitrates for all sources to the following values:-

Best : Mode 0, 7500000/9000000, RQ 100
High: Mode 0, 3660000/6000000, RQ 75
Med: Mode 0, 2500000/5960000, RQ 40
Basic: Mode 1, 1700000/2000000, RQ 0


----------



## jonny m

Hi all
Thats brilliant! So to get the best picture you need to :
copy fpga file across - to fix mode 0 offset
run the script - to enable mode 0
copy across the iicsetw from somewhere - for fixing rgb issues
run /var/hack/rgb/iicsetw 0x8C 0x38 21 0x39 20 & - to fix rgb 

err anyidea where to get iicsetw ? is it part of tivoweb?

Thanks again all!


----------



## cashew1970

It can be found here


----------



## jonny m

Thanks for the info!! Will get playing.
Strange that all these addons have appeared to fix all these things, you'd think tivo would have got it right first time round - esp the rgb colour.


----------



## markabuckley

RGB tweak worked a treat - thanks for all the help guys.

It makes the PQ much better in my opinion.

I get quite a few white flashes from Res 0 tweak - but you can just ignore them - I don't find them that distracting at all.

Mark.


----------



## Heuer

markabuckley said:


> RGB tweak worked a treat - thanks for all the help guys.
> 
> It makes the PQ much better in my opinion.
> 
> I get quite a few white flashes from Res 0 tweak - but you can just ignore them - I don't find them that distracting at all.
> 
> Mark.


On some monitors you can move the picture down a tad which will help further. The flashing is just on the last two lines of the picture and seems to happen only on BBC programmes (at least via Sat).


----------



## dave h-j

jonny m said:


> Thanks for the info!! Will get playing.
> Strange that all these addons have appeared to fix all these things, you'd think tivo would have got it right first time round - esp the rgb colour.


  Can't believe it taken me over 12 months to try this fix !!! Just run it now and the output from my Tivo now matches the output from my sky box..

Now all I need to do it move the picture down a little bit - any easy way to do this?


----------



## 6022tivo

Heuer said:


> On some monitors you can move the picture down a tad which will help further. The flashing is just on the last two lines of the picture and seems to happen only on BBC programmes (at least via Sat).


I wish it was just two lines. Mine varies and will be more than two lines in the bottom right hand corner.


----------



## jonny m

6022tivo
Do you find that its too distracting? I still havnt switched to mode 0 and was conviced but am still abit worried about the flashes, I would love tivo to have aux quality but im reluctant to see the flashes. When do you see yours? It is a particular channel? analogue bbc1 for example? how are sky or freeview?


----------



## markabuckley

I get mine most of the time - but don't find it distracting at all.

My wife hasn't even mentionned it - so it can't be that obvioius.

Mark.


----------



## 6022tivo

jonny m said:


> 6022tivo
> Do you find that its too distracting? I still havnt switched to mode 0 and was conviced but am still abit worried about the flashes, I would love tivo to have aux quality but im reluctant to see the flashes. When do you see yours? It is a particular channel? analogue bbc1 for example? how are sky or freeview?


Hi Jonny..

It is not too distracting, it is normally always on BBC1, and especially during darker scenes in Eastenders 

I have tried lowering the rates bit by bit, but it did not make much difference, so gone back to the recommended 900000 (I thinbk) for Mode 0.

The picture quality is worth it to go Mode 0 and put up with the flashes in the bottom right. They are mainly green and white for me, and not constant, just notice the odd flash every minute or so.


----------



## blindlemon

jonny m said:


> I would love tivo to have aux quality but im reluctant to see the flashes. When do you see yours? It is a particular channel? analogue bbc1 for example? how are sky or freeview?


I mostly see white flashes on BBC channels - both on Sky and Freeview.

I do sometimes see them on other channels - usually when the picture is contrasty or grainly - but they're fairly infrequent on both my TiVos. Many evenings I can watch TV for 3 or 4 hours and not see one - then if I pick the 'wrong' BBC recording I could see 20 in 5 minutes - so YMMV, greatly.

Nevertheless, Mode 0 can be turned off just as easily as it can be turned on (easier in fact, as you don't have to remove LJ's fpga file) - so why not give it a try?


----------



## jonny m

Hi blindlemon
Would I just reverse your script?  

If I knew the values to change I would create the backout script and try it out. 

I had a look at your tcl script and its amazing - not many tcl guides on the net. I've done alot of perl and its...nothing like tcl by the looks of things.

If you could tell me how to reset it then I would definately give it a go!

Cheers
John


----------



## blindlemon

Stuart posted a modified version here that includes a reset method.


----------



## jonny m

brilliant !!
thanks blindlemon I will give it a try.


----------



## jonny m

WHoops having trouble!
I've renamed the fpga with the new version
but when I run the setupMode0.tcl, I get the below,and it is there as cat-ing the file works fine.
bash-2.02# ./setupMode0.tcl
bash: ./setupMode0.tcl: No such file or directory

Ive set its permissions to :
rwxrwxrwx 1 0 0 12113 Jan 7 22:42 setupMode0.tcl

ANy ideas? I've not rebooted yet just in case something else has gone on.


----------



## jonny m

I've even done a simple hello world script to test I can run tcl scripts ok and it fails, looks like my tcl setup isn't working? Am i missing something that should be installed with tivoweb? 

bash-2.02# cat test2.tcl
#!/tvbin/tivosh

puts "hello world"
bash-2.02#
bash-2.02# ./test2.tcl
bash: ./test2.tcl: No such file or directory
bash-2.02# test2.tcl
bash: test2.tcl: command not found


----------



## Fozzie

'chmod 755 test2.tcl' ?


----------



## jonny m

Hi Fozzie
Thanks for your suggestion, I tried that and it was the same result.
Here are my file permissions:
-rwxrwxrwx 1 0 0 12113 Jan 7 22:34 setupMode0.tcl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 350 Jan 7 23:48 test.tcl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 43 Jan 7 23:49 test2.tcl

If I do a chmod 644 test2.tcl I get the below:
bash-2.02# ./test2.tcl
bash: ./test2.tcl: Permission denied

So I can execute the file, it just can't seem to call the /tvbin/tivosh.

Tried the iicsetw rgb fix - very nice BTW. Made a big difference.


----------



## jonny m

Got it fixed - just supplied the full path and the file to be executed. Still a mystery to me though, it should work without this.

bash-2.02# /tvbin/tivosh setupMode0.tcl
Resources for BEST mode set to Mode 0 (bobones settings) values

 

Cheers all


----------



## jonny m

Thanks guys all working now and the quality is superb!
I havn't set disk saving to on yet and I've seen a few artifacts but they weren't anything to notice and they might be freeview as well.


----------



## cashew1970

I am also having issue swith the script that Gary posted.

Have copied to /var/hack (Tried both binary and Asci)

I chmod 755ed it

When I telnet to the tivo, I get the message 

"No such file or directory"

It is there, and I have checked that I am putting the correct case.
Have also used the Tab button to select the file that way.

Any clues anyone??


----------



## jonny m

Cashew
I had the same issue (see above posts) use you need to specify the command interpreter, try with the below command.

# /tvbin/tivosh setupMode0.tcl


----------



## cashew1970

Tried that too after reading your thread, but had the same issue...

I can't seem to put the file in /tvbin/tivosh with Core FTP Lite..... do you think that is the issue.... or should I still be able to run it from /var/hack??


----------



## jonny m

Cashew
what happens if you type 
/tvbin/tivosh
do you get the tivosh running? 
it won't matter where the script is stored, what you are doing now is running an instance of tivosh but supplying a script to run.
you don't need to put the script in /tvbin/ and esp not /tvbin/tivosh as thats a file and not a directory.


----------



## cashew1970

If I telnet to tivo and type /tvbin/tivosh i get a percentage sign, if I then type the path I get the same error

Welcome to the wonderful world of TiVo... 

File system on / is now READONLY - type 'rw' to make READ/WRITE

Bash /var/tmp #/tvbin/tivosh
% /var/hack/setupMode0.tcl

% couldn't execute "/var/hack/setupMode0.tcl": no such file or directory
% %


----------



## jonny m

Cashew
The % indicates you are in the tivosh_-ell_ - which is good.
You are not starting that the then typing in the filename - you need to type both at the same time and from the directory that you have setupMode0.tcl located in - in your case it looks like /var/hack
i.e. type full line below then hit return.
/tvbin/tivosh setupMode0.tcl


----------



## cashew1970

Thats done the trick... thanks Jonny.....


----------



## jonny m

Glad to be of service!


----------



## jonny m

Just want to say after a couple of weeks running mode 0 the quality is FAB! I get I would say 1 flash a week as I run mode 0 only on my freeview box and mode 4 for the internal tuner. Mode0 for the internal tuner was flash city so wouldn't recommend.

Cashew
I know the reason we had to run the shell script with the shell path first is that we prob downloaded the file onto windows which will inset a ^M CTRL+M character at the end of the line and when the unix shell tries to run this it sees "\tvbin\tivosh^M" which of course is nonsense - you can see this if you load the joe editor but not if you cat the file to the screen - which is confusing. I fixed my script by loading into textpad and saving as a unix file - which will remove the ^M's.

Thanks guys for all your help.


----------



## djb2002

Does anyone know what the default bitrates are normally ?

And does anyone know if these settings could cause pixelling along the bottom right of the screen, and occasional freezing of the image (and now and again freezing the box completely) ?

Thanks
Daniel


----------



## djb2002

djb2002 said:


> Does anyone know what the default bitrates are normally ?
> 
> And does anyone know if these settings could cause pixelling along the bottom right of the screen, and occasional freezing of the image (and now and again freezing the box completely) ?


Anyone ?

Thanks
Daniel


----------



## blindlemon

No. That sounds like a drive problem - sorry


----------



## djb2002

blindlemon said:


> No. That sounds like a drive problem - sorry


Even when there is only a small pixelling at the bottom right of the screen ??

Thanks again
Daniel


----------



## 6022tivo

No small pixeling is normal with Mode 0 in the bottom, normally right corner.

I think Blindlemon was refering to the "and occasional freezing of the image (and now and again freezing the box completely) ?", which sounds very like the HDD failing.


----------



## djb2002

6022tivo said:


> No small pixeling is normal with Mode 0 in the bottom, normally right corner.
> 
> I think Blindlemon was refering to the "and occasional freezing of the image (and now and again freezing the box completely) ?", which sounds very like the HDD failing.


Do you know how I can change the 'Mode 0' settings, so that I don't get pixeling ?

Thanks
Daniel


----------



## 6022tivo

With Mode Zero, you normally get a small amount of white/green flashes in the bottom right hand corner, I would not describe it as pixeling??? 

Excessive pixeling may be a HDD failing or bad freeview reception is you are on freeview??. 

Personally I was getting fed up with the flashes in the bottom right and tried adjusting the bitrates down to get rid of them, this did not make much difference, so I just kept with the Full Mode zero and got used to them. 

If you have tivoweb adjust the bitrate settings in the Bitrates tab(I think). 

If it is excessing pixeling and freezing, then replace the HDD and see how it goes.


----------



## djb2002

Yes, I think I did describe it badly by saying 'pixeling' - It is, as you say, a white/green flash. Do you happen to know the 'factory bitrate' settings to remove mode zero, and set it back to how they were originally set ?

The freezing happens occasionally, but there are errors showing in the kernel log that indicate a bad hard disk, but I can't tell from the errors which disk is faulty, as it refers to both hda and hdb.



HTML:


May 20 17:29:18 (none) kernel: hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } 
May 20 17:29:18 (none) kernel: hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }, secCnt=127, LBAsect=12734272 
May 20 17:29:26 (none) kernel: hdb: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } 
May 20 17:29:26 (none) kernel: hdb: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }, secCnt=127, LBAsect=12734271

Anyone have any ideas for either problem?

Thanks again
Daniel


----------



## sanderton

The white flased depend on what channel you are watching (bizarrely) and the bitrate which triggers them varies from machine to machine, you just need to experiment until you get an accptable level.


----------



## Heuer

Or if you have fixed pixel display (Plasma or LCD) you should be able to move the picture down a couple of lines which will reduce the annoyance.


----------



## djb2002

I'm just using a standard CRT TV.

I've no idea about 'bit rates', so not sure what to try reducing it to - Whether I reduce it by 10 or by 100 or 1000 ???? - Do you happen to know what the original settings are ? - At least I could work from there.

Also, from the error messages I was getting, does anyone know which of the hard drives appear to be faulty (or whether they both are) ??? - Is there any scan I can run while connected to the TiVo (via telnet), that doesn't involve taking them out and putting them into a PC ?

Thanks
Daniel


----------



## Heuer

Standard bit rates are 5960000, 3660000, 2760000 and 1700000 for each of the four quality settings. You can change them via TiVoWeb (enter after each change and 'update resources' to finish).

Best to change both drives as if one is going down the other will not be far behind. Blindlemon can sort you out a new drive ready configured with ewverything I believe.


----------



## ciper

I almost posted a link to the "other" forum. Instead Ill copy and paste a recent post of mine for your reading pleasure:

Based on the information in the following picture (source link below) I have come up with what should be the most efficient settings for each resolution. What do you guys think?








http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/tutorial/bitrate.html
From this page you can find information for two of the resolutions available on the tivo (720 and 352). I then used these resolution/bitrate combinations to extrapolate the other two resolutions.

resolution number 0 720x480 
max based chart = 7800
vbr based chart = 6300

resolution number 1 352x480
max based chart = 4000
vbr based chart = 3200

resolution number 4 544x480 
max 720 based (544 / 720) * 7800 = 5893
max 352 based (544 / 352) * 4000 = 6181
vbr 720 based (544 / 720) * 6300 = 4760
vbr 352 based (544 / 352) * 3200 = 4945

2 Med/ 480x480
max 720 based (480 / 720) * 7800 = 5200
max 352 based (480 / 352) * 4000 = 5454 
vbr 720 based (480 / 720) * 6300 = 4200
vbr 352 based (480 / 352) * 3200 = 4363

I could have averaged those together but they already seemed quite high compared to what others were using. Instead I decided to take the calculated numbers based on 720x480 and round down to come up with the following settings.

*BestVBRBitrate 6300000
*BestMAXBitrate 7800000
*BestResolution 0
*HighVBRBitrate 4700000
*HighMAXBitrate 5800000
*HighResolution 4
*MediumVBRBitrate 4200000
*MediumMAXBitrate 5200000
*MediumResolution 2
*BasicVBRBitrate 3200000
*BasicMAXBitrate 4000000
*BasicResolution 1

edit: oh yeah here are my other settings which you probably arent interested in
MinRecordQuality 0
MaxRecordQuality 100
DefaultRecordQuality 0
DefaultLiveRecordQuality 100
RecordQualityBest 100
RecordQualityHigh 75
RecordQualityMedium 40
RecordQualityBasic 0

Im very happy with the results so far. Before making any recordings I noticed an immediate difference in clarity on "live" shows. I had configured my tivo to use cable + satelite even though I only have cable. This was to enable the video inputs on the back. I then configured only one channel on the satelite feed (channel 100 "pay-per-view previews). I connect the video out of my computer to the tivos video in and when i choose channel 100 i can see the computers output. I played the intoduction to the price is right (which usually has a ton of artifacts) and the picture was alot better. Combine this with the 1 hour live tv buffer i just enabled and Im very happy


----------



## smiffy

Does somebody have the default settings? 

I put my tivo into mode 0 some time ago, but now I want to revert to the original settings - but I didnt keep a note of the settings.


----------



## blindlemon

Check the post two above yours


----------



## ciper

Here are the defaults from my sony svr-2000 since Heuer's are incomplete
Resource Name Resource Value
MinRecordQuality	0
MaxRecordQuality	100
DefaultRecordQuality	100
DefaultLiveRecordQuality	100
RecordQualityBest	100
RecordQualityHigh	75
RecordQualityMedium	40
RecordQualityBasic	0
DBSBestVBRBitrate	5215000
DBSBestMAXBitrate	5960000
DBSBestResolution	4
DBSHighVBRBitrate	3202500
DBSHighMAXBitrate	3660000
DBSHighResolution	2
DBSMediumVBRBitrate	2415000
DBSMediumMAXBitrate	2760000
DBSMediumResolution	1
DBSBasicVBRBitrate	1630000
DBSBasicMAXBitrate	1630000
DBSBasicResolution	1
CATVBestVBRBitrate	5215000
CATVBestMAXBitrate	5960000
CATVBestResolution	2
CATVHighVBRBitrate	3202500
CATVHighMAXBitrate	3660000
CATVHighResolution	2
CATVMediumVBRBitrate	2415000
CATVMediumMAXBitrate	2760000
CATVMediumResolution	1
CATVBasicVBRBitrate	1630000
CATVBasicMAXBitrate	1630000
CATVBasicResolution	1
RooftopBestVBRBitrate	5215000
RooftopBestMAXBitrate	5960000
RooftopBestResolution	2
RooftopHighVBRBitrate	3202500
RooftopHighMAXBitrate	3660000
RooftopHighResolution	2
RooftopMediumVBRBitrate	2415000
RooftopMediumMAXBitrate	2760000
RooftopMediumResolution	1
RooftopBasicVBRBitrate	1630000
RooftopBasicMAXBitrate	1630000
RooftopBasicResolution	1


----------



## bretski

EDIT>>> LOL Just noticed the post above, how observant of me!  


Could anyone list or point me to all the default Bitrate resource settings please? I modified them all months ago and have now found my Tivo a new home so need them all at default for the new novice owner.

Are the AltBitrate settings the defaults? Im in TivoWeb at the moment.

Thank you for any help you can provide,

Brett


----------



## blindlemon

Those are US values which are optimised for NTSC. 

The attached script will set the values back to the UK defaults for CBR, with the added bonus of actually having different "vbr" values for VBR too


----------



## bretski

blindlemon said:


> Those are US values which are optimised for NTSC.
> 
> The attached script will set the values back to the UK defaults for CBR, with the added bonus of actually having different "vbr" values for VBR too


Thank you


----------



## smiffy

blindlemon said:


> The attached script will set the values back to the UK defaults for CBR, with the added bonus of actually having different "vbr" values for VBR too


Thanks for that - very useful ;-)


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> All that does is use the 'alternate' set of bitrates AFAIK, so no.
> 
> Although if you know any more I'd be interested to hear about it...


Blindlemon,

As a confirmed Basic recordings man I have just finally got myself round to enabling Mode 0 (largely for the benefit of watching Live Tv) and can confirm that under the Messages&Setup/MyPreferences/RFVideo menu changing from "No don't smooth the video" to "Yes smooth the video on RF Channels" indeed has the effect of selecting the "alternate bitrates" set which I had left at their original settings. I couldn't initially figure out why all the recording hours capacities quoted in "Video Recording Quality" had gone back to exactly their original values after initailly seeing new changed recording hours values after changing settings in Bitrates in Resources Editor and rebooting. Anyhow this is certainly a handy feature in terms of it being an easy way to get straight back to the original non Mode 0 setup if people are at all bothered by White flashes. The number of hours in Video Recording Quality changed right away even mid way through a recording but I imagine Mode 0 recording or in Live tv would only actually start again on the next recording or channel change?

On the Basic quality recording setting in Resource Editor does VBR (Save Disk Space) not actually operate then as the Tivo screen for Save Disk Space suggests is the case (but then it lies because as supplied VBR/Save Disk Space doesn't operate at all) or does it now operate due to our manual adjustment of settings in the Resource Editor? Of course I suppose I can check this via the tvlog file after doing a recording. As one moderately content with Basic on my crappy old 4:3 29" 100hz telly on many recording types would I get a better quality Basic quality with some loss of total program hours by setting the Maximum bit rate at say 2500000 or even 3000000 while leaving the minimum at 1700000? Or should I go for lower bit rates with Mode 2 if I want to achieve this end?

Lastly on the iicsetw file option so far as I could tell when I installed the two files in /var/hack/bin and rebooted I actually got a less acceptable more bleached picture quality than before so have now disabled it by sticking a # on the start of the line that I had inserted to call it. Can you recommend any different setting values for a 100hz digital scan 4:3 29" telly or are the default values that go with Mode 0 and Ljay's revised file already acceptable for a CRT without modification. And yes I do output RGB to my telly as the picture is immedately less sharp as soon as I change the menu option on the Tivo to output PAL. By the way I have previously also installed the No Flicker upgrade set.


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> Setrgb.sh varies from machine to machine, but the basic script just calls iicset (or now iicsetw) to change the RGB parameters.


Why does one need this script file at all and how is the script called on startup? What commands does this script file actually contain?

Isn't it easier just to add the line required to run iicsetw in rc.sysinit.author.edit via the Startup Editor module for TivoWeb or via the Hackman editor for this file? Or have I missed something obvious somewhere?


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> Blindlemon,
> 
> As a confirmed Basic recordings man I have just finally got myself round to enabling Mode 0


Wow, one extreme to the other without passing GO!



> On the Basic quality recording setting in Resource Editor does VBR (Save Disk Space) not actually operate then as the Tivo screen for Save Disk Space suggests is the case (but then it lies because as supplied VBR/Save Disk Space doesn't operate at all) or does it now operate due to our manual adjustment of settings in the Resource Editor? .


VBR does nothing on any setting of an unhacked TiVo; only by changing the settings so there are two different bitrates does it start working.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> Why does one need this script file at all and how is the script called on startup? What commands does this script file actually contain?
> 
> Isn't it easier just to add the line required to run iicsetw in rc.sysinit.author.edit via the Startup Editor module for TivoWeb or via the Hackman editor for this file? Or have I missed something obvious somewhere?


The script file fixes some deficiencies in the way RGB encoding is configured by default; you don't actually need it but if you're a quality freak (which most Mode 0 users are) it improves the picture.

Yes, you can call it in rc.sysint.author etc, although something in the back of my mind says it might beed to be started with a delay. Search for the very long and detailed thread about it for more.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> Can you recommend any different setting values for a 100hz digital scan 4:3 29" telly .


Well for one, try disabling the 100Hz mode on your TV. 100Hz processing - which adds an whole extra analogue-to-digital-to-analogue stage - can clash horribly with digital sources like TiVo, massively increasing the amount of on-screen artifacts you get.

Unless you are one of the few who are bothered by 50Hz flicker, 100Hz is best turned off.


----------



## Pete77

sanderton said:


> VBR does nothing on any setting of an unhacked TiVo; only by changing the settings so there are two different bitrates does it start working.


Yes I realise that VBR doesn't operate if the VBR and MAX bitrates are set exactly the same in the Resource Editor on TivoWeb on the higher quality settings but does VBR still operate even in Mode 1 recording as used by Basic? I imagine the answer is Yes? Presumably a Max Bit rate of 3000000 and a Min still of 1700000 would lead to a better quality Basic recording?

And on "Recording Quality" what options are there other than 100, 75, 55 (a Blindlemon replacement recommendation for 40 on Medium) 40 and 0. Are all values between 0 and 100 valid on a gradually sliding scale and what exactly is this value changing the actual setting of in the recording. Also does Mode 3 actually exist as a valid setting or not and if so why didn't Tivo use 1 for Basic, 2 for Medium and 3 for High?

Lastly when I watch live a program that Tivo is also recording in a lower quality setting (in this case Blindlemon's recommended Basic setting) what recording quality am I actually seeing live on the television? Is the live buffer showing me Mode 0 or does it reduce to whatever quality it is recording in if that quality is lower than Mode 0. Certainly watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire at the moment it looks remarkably sharp but perhaps it is in fact still Basic in which case my eyes clearly need testing.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> Yes I realise that VBR doesn't operate if the VBR and MAX bitrates are set exactly the same in the Resource Editor on TivoWeb on the higher quality settings but does VBR still operate even in Mode 1 recording as used by Basic? I imagine the answer is Yes? Presumably a Max Bit rate of 3000000 and a Min still of 1700000 would lead to a better quality Basic recording?


VBR is activateable in all modes.



> And on "Recording Quality" what options are there other than 100, 75, 55 (a Blindlemon replacement recommendation for 40 on Medium) 40 and 0. Are all values between 0 and 100 valid on a gradually sliding scale and what exactly is this value changing the actual setting of in the recording.


A much debated point. My view is that the number itself does nothing, it's just the internal numeric represnetation of the mode which allows the software to easily do logic based on the recording quality along the line sof "If recQual >50 then..." without having to have the names hard coded in. There may be equations in the software which change the settings on the chip to ones more appropriate for the higher settings which are triggered with a value over 50. There's a long thread where we tried to figure this out.



> Also does Mode 3 actually exist as a valid setting or not and if so why didn't Tivo use 1 for Basic, 2 for Medium and 3 for High?


On a standard TiVo only two modes are in use - a low resolution for Basic and Medium and a higher one for High and Best. The two pairs of settings with the smae resolution differ in bitrates. the exact high res mode in use varies depending on what source you use, for no obvious reason - a factory tiVo recordsd Sky in higher res than Freeview.



> Lastly when I watch live a program that Tivo is also recording in a lower quality setting (in this case Blindlemon's recommended Basic setting) what recording quality am I actually seeing live on the television? Is the live buffer showing me Mode 0 or does it reduce to whatever quality it is recording in if that quality is lower than Mode 0. Certainly watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire at the moment it looks remarkably sharp but perhaps it is in fact still Basic in which case my eyes clearly need testing.


There is only one encoder in a TiVo; if it's recording in Basic, you'll see Basic if you watch the programme "live".

I must say on a 29-inch 4:3 set - the equivalent of a 32-inch or so 16:9 set - I'm stunned that you find Basic acceptable. I've never been able to use Basic for anything bar radio. Some of the kid's shows I put in Medium as they aren't fussy.


----------



## Pete77

sanderton said:


> Well for one, try disabling the 100Hz mode on your TV. 100Hz processing - which adds an whole extra analogue-to-digital-to-analogue stage - can clash horribly with digital sources like TiVo, massively increasing the amount of on-screen artifacts you get.


The tv's menus (1998 Philips Matchline set) have an option for Digital Scan On or Off, which I imagine controls the 100hz mode (who knows where the manual is by now). This was set to On. I have done a lot of playing around following your comments including also the Colour, Brightness and Sharpness settings and I am one of those people who whatever my other optical failings may be can just see the flicker appear on more colourful objects when Digital Scan is turned off. And also when I turn Digital Scan off the picture doesn't seem to improve in any other way. There is also a function called Contrast Plus which testing suggests is best left Off.

I have been interested to note other comments on here lately that a Plasma telly actually works better with SD telly (and therefore an S1 Tivo) than an LCD set which is kind of a Catch 22 situation given that as I understand it HD works better with an LCD television?

If large Widescreen 32" or 36" CRT tvs were going for silly money on Ebay for £100 or less (as they ought to be given their technical obsolescence for HD and their terrible lack of convenience for movement requiring pick up in person) I would buy one of those now but for some bizarre reason any decent brand like Sony or Panasonic seems to fetch £300 to £500 whereas discounted HD Ready new 32" Plasma Tvs seem to be only around £500 on Ebay. I can't understand why people are willing to pay much more than £150 for large Widescreen CRT sets from Sony or Panasonic today circumstances given the hassle in moving them and their out of date features.

This 1998 television was repaired in Dec 2002 (some dry joint or other on a circuit board was the problem) for £90 with a 1 year guarantee when it was just about worth doing. If it packs up again it will hit the scrap heap but of course in circumstances when I would be fairly happy for it to turn up its toes I expect it will now stubbornly potter on for ages. Its so big and heavy (its also got Dolby Surround sound and a big subwoofer in the back of the set and battleship wooden cabinet with glass doors below it) it doesn't really fit in either of my bedrooms and I'm loathed to scrap a perfectly serviceable telly with a pretty good picture. And the longer I wait the cheaper HD ready tvs are becoming and I would want at least a 42" set to be broadly comparable to a 4:3 29" set in screen area.

Anyhow I see no evidence from testing that 100hz mode is making my picture worse. Unless Digital Scan On/Off relates to something else.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> The tv's menus (1998 Philips Matchline set) have an option for Digital Scan On or Off, which I imagine controls the 100hz mode (who knows where the manual is by now). This was set to On. I have done a lot of playing around following your comments including also the Colour, Brightness and Sharpness settings and I am one of those people who whatever my other optical failings may be can just see the flicker appear on more colourful objects when Digital Scan is turned off. And also when I turn Digital Scan off the picture doesn't seem to improve in any other way. There is also a function called Contrast Plus which testing suggests is best left Off.


You're in luck then. You're most likely to see the effects as making posterisation of skies and misty scenes much worse, and generally seeing MPEG artifacts like mosquito noise a lot more clearly.



> I have been interested to note other comments on here lately that a Plasma telly actually works better with SD telly (and therefore an S1 Tivo) than an LCD set which is kind of a Catch 22 situation given that as I understand it HD works better with an LCD television?


I think you meant CRT not plasma. Yes indeed, many people who buy plasmas or LCDs for "normal" TV are disappointed with the quality. Their performace with HD makes up for it though, and with decent scaling (either through a PC, an upsaclimng DVd palyer or an external scaler) the picture with SD can be good.



> If large Widescreen 32" or 36" CRT tvs were going for silly money on Ebay for £100 or less (as they ought to be given their technical obsolescence for HD and their terrible lack of convenience for movement requiring pick up in person) I would buy one of those now but for some bizarre reason any decent brand like Sony or Panasonic seems to fetch £300 to £500.


I wish. I only got £150 for my 36-inch Panansonic a few months ago!


----------



## Pete77

sanderton said:


> You're in luck then. You're most likely to see the effects as making posterisation of skies and misty scenes much worse, and generally seeing MPEG artifacts like mosquito noise a lot more clearly.


Do you mean that turning Digital Scan (100hz mode) off will lead to mosquito noise in the picture appearing or that turning it on will cause mosquito noise? My impression is that when I turn Digital Scan/100hz off mosquito noise appears in the brighter coloured objects in the picture but everything else remains the same.



> I think you meant CRT not plasma. Yes indeed, many people who buy plasmas or LCDs for "normal" TV are disappointed with the quality


No I meant Plasma in that if you accept that the premise that you are going to upgrade to a flat screen telly you then only have Plasma or LCD to choose from and the comments I read here suggested that Plasma gave better results for SD telly than LCD did. Of course I omitted to mention that on the whole neither Plasma or LCD were thought to give an uplift in quality compared to CRT. Another of my justifications therefore for hanging on to my large Dolby Surround 4:3 as really important programs to me like F1 Racing are still in 4:3 and this telly would fetch nothing on Ebay since people aren't prepared to go to the hassle of picking up a large weighty non widescreen telly from the depths of the countryside.

Clearly I don't have the same priorities as some of you as my real priority is maximum program choice and maximum picture quality while nice is no big deal. If you had spent a few years looking at your grandmother's old crungy black and white set at University in the early 1980s then even a 29" 100hz 4:3 telly seems like luxurt and a widescreen HD tv seems like a very small uplift given that I'm not a DVD or HD-DVD buyer and a lot of the telly I will be watching will only be in SD for some time to come.



> I wish. I only got £150 for my 36-inch Panansonic a few months ago!


I wish you had said you were selling as that sounds a very good price. Quite a few Panasonic and Sony 36" sets seem to make well over £300 when I have been tracking Ebay auctions lately.


----------



## Pete77

sanderton said:


> On a standard TiVo only two modes are in use - a low resolution for Basic and Medium and a higher one for High and Best. The two pairs of settings with the smae resolution differ in bitrates. the exact high res mode in use varies depending on what source you use, for no obvious reason - a factory tiVo recordsd Sky in higher res than Freeview.


Strange because my original Resources Editor settings on TivoWeb showed the following:-

DBS:-

Best:- 5960000/5960000 Mode 4
High:- 3660000/3660000 Mode 2
Medium:- 2760000/2760000 Mode 1
Basic:- 1700000/1700000 Mode 1

CATV and Rooftop:-

Best:- 5960000/5960000 Mode 2
High:- 3660000/3660000 Mode 2
Medium:- 2760000/2760000 Mode 1
Basic:- 1700000/1700000 Mode 1

The only difference across all the platform types is that they use 3 Modes for Digital Satellite but only 2 Modes but the same bitrates for cable/DTT/Aerial. For some reason DSat is considered capable of Mode 4 at 5960000/Best while Cable, DTT & Aerial are only thought worthy of Mode 2 at the same Bit rate. I would have to test setting up my Tivo at 5960000 in Mode 4, Mode 2, Mode 1 and Mode 0 to see what the impact of different Modes at the same Bitrate is on the number of recording hours thought to be available.

I would be intrigued to know what effect being in different Modes at the same Bitrate has on how the recordings are physically made and the resulting picture quality of the recording.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> Strange because my original Resources Editor settings on TivoWeb showed the following:-
> 
> DBS:-
> 
> Best:- 5960000/5960000 Mode 4
> High:- 3660000/3660000 Mode 2
> Medium:- 2760000/2760000 Mode 1
> Basic:- 1700000/1700000 Mode 1
> 
> CATV and Rooftop:-
> 
> Best:- 5960000/5960000 Mode 2
> High:- 3660000/3660000 Mode 2
> Medium:- 2760000/2760000 Mode 1
> Basic:- 1700000/1700000 Mode 1
> 
> The only difference across all the platform types is that they use 3 Modes for Digital Satellite but only 2 Modes but the same bitrates for cable/DTT/Aerial. For some reason DSat is considered capable of Mode 4 at 5960000/Best while Cable, DTT & Aerial are only thought worthy of Mode 2 at the same Bit rate. I would have to test setting up my Tivo at 5960000 in Mode 4, Mode 2, Mode 1 and Mode 0 to see what the impact of different Modes at the same Bitrate is on the number of recording hours thought to be available.
> 
> I would be intrigued to know what effect being in different Modes at the same Bitrate has on how the recordings are physically made and the resulting picture quality of the recording.


My memory playing tricks on me there!

The modes differ only in their resolutions. If your run a higher resolution at the same bitrate you get m,ore artifacts as more compression has to be applied. At the same bitrate, the number of recording hors will be the same, by definition.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> Do you mean that turning Digital Scan (100hz mode) off will lead to mosquito noise in the picture appearing or that turning it on will cause mosquito noise? My impression is that when I turn Digital Scan/100hz off mosquito noise appears in the brighter coloured objects in the picture but everything else remains the same.


No I mean (in my experience) 100Hz processing emphasises the mosquito noise which is already there.



> No I meant Plasma in that if you accept that the premise that you are going to upgrade to a flat screen telly you then only have Plasma or LCD to choose from and the comments I read here suggested that Plasma gave better results for SD telly than LCD did.


Different HDTVs give different resolts for SD pictures, but I wouldn't say plasma was better or worse at SD than LCD. Depends on the scaling quality, not the image technology.



> If you had spent a few years looking at your grandmother's old crungy black and white set at University in the early 1980s then even a 29" 100hz 4:3 telly seems like luxurt .


When I was a student in the early 80s we couldn't afford any kind of TV!


----------



## Pete77

sanderton said:


> When I was a student in the early 80s we couldn't afford any kind of TV!


Well the tv was free because my grandmother had died in 1979 and it had been sitting in the garage till I took it to University with me in 1982. I seem to recall living in constant dread of the appearance of the tv licence men although no one who had a telly in their room at Uni got one as the law at that stage was still ambiguous. The general feeling back then was that if they caught you as a student nothing would happen as long as you went out and bought a licence straight away.

I think subsequently the law was tightened to make it even clearer that it was a definite offence not to have a licence for a telly in student halls and they may now even be prosecuting students who don't have a licence without giving them a chance to buy one.

Perhaps you are making up for all those years of student deprivation now by constantly ensuring that you are always at the bleeding edge of technological development.


----------



## blindlemon

sanderton said:


> My view is that the [RQ] number itself does nothing, it's just the internal numeric represnetation of the mode which allows the software to easily do logic based on the recording quality


I initially disagreed with this, thinking that, eg. 95 would give a better quality than 75.

However, my initial experiments overlooked the fact that I was playing around with a quality setting (medium or basic) that previously had one of the two lowest RQ numbers (default 40 and 0) and setting the RQ for that quality to 95 thus making that quality have one of the two highest RQ numbers (now 100 & 95). This made those recordings sharper, hence my assertion that the RQ was _in itself_ a significant parameter.

However, I eventually realized that there are only 2 sharpness settings (controlled by the RQ parameter): fuzzy or sharp. You could set 1,3,5 and 9 if you liked and the result would be that 1 & 3 would be fuzzy while 5 & 9 were sharp, or you could set 0,40,75 and 100 (the defaults) and get the same effect for 0 & 40 (fuzzy) and 75 & 100 (sharp). This seems to apply regardless of the mode setting (ie. the resolution), and is obviously intended to improve the appearance of lower resolution, lower bitrate recordings by applying a deliberate "blurring" effect to smooth over jaggies and blockiness that might otherwise be evident.


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> However,
> 
> I eventually realized that there are only 2 sharpness settings (controlled by the RQ parameter): fuzzy or sharp. You could set 1,3,5 and 9 if you liked and the result would be that 1 & 3 would be fuzzy while 5 & 9 were sharp, or you could set 0,40,75 and 100 (the defaults) and get the same effect for 0 & 40 (fuzzy) and 75 & 100 (sharp). This seems to apply regardless of the mode setting (ie. the resolution), and is obviously intended to improve the appearance of lower resolution, lower bitrate recordings by applying a deliberate "blurring" effect to smooth over jaggies and blockiness that might otherwise be evident.


I wish I had realised this whole Resource Editor business was as much about playing with settings for Basic as for Mode 0 and I might have had a go rather earlier. Also there were some rather dire warnings about burning about the encoder chip and so on which I now imagine is just the usual case of people covering their backs.

I notice that increasing the Max BitRate has a big impact on the forecast hours available for each recording type but as long as your VBR Bitrate is a lot lower than the Max rate the actual space consumed by a recording by a particular quality type is little different from before. For instance with Basic now set to VBR Bitrate of 1500000 and Max Bitrate set to 2500000 compared to 1700000 for both before and with Save Disk Space (VBR) switched on (as confirmed in tvlog data) the total disk space consumed by a typical 60 minute recording is about the same as before - namely about 735MB. I really should switch over to Mode 0 and high bit rates for everything but that would mean deleting acres of recordings. To be honest to run at Mode 0 with 7500000/9000000 I would definitely need 2 x 500Gb hard drives as that would then be about 280 hours of recording with VBR enabled.

The other thing is that I tried to install your iicsetw script files to run the iicsetw utility to stop the oversaturated RGB display as per your checksetrgb.zip file set at http://archive2.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=102371&page=3&pp=30
and it just caused the machine to keep rebooting about 50 seconds or so after it appeared to have finished its startup routine and had gone to Live Tv. I see there is actually code in one of the two sh files to make the machine reboot up to five times though if it has an error condition. Is this out of some sadistic wish to try and clear out our whole /var directory?  

I managed to disable the two script files from Startup Editor the fourth time round before it rebooted the next time as I was terrified I was going to lose the whole /var directory but I assume the rebooting would in fact have stopped the next time. What exactly would have been causing the repeated reboots as I thought iicsetw didn't have the reboot problem of iicset?

Well its certainly been an interesting exercise. Is there any reason my VBR and Max range for Basic is too far apart now (1500000 and 2500000)? And do you think the much higher figure for Max is likely to cut out the very occasional heavy blockiness I observed before on some fast movement under Basic.

As to White Flashes I'm just not getting any from my Sky Digibox on Live Tv when its in Mode 0 (i.e. not recording in my case) but I was getting them on my BT Netgem IPlayer Freeview box feed on Channel Five. I think this may be because the SDN Multiplex signal here is the weakest anyway and there is a heavy wind here tonight rattling about the aerial. As Tivo only trust CATV for Mode2 rather than Mode 4 shouldn't a lower Max bit rate be used here than for satellite?

Any thoughts comments on this would be appreciated.


----------



## blindlemon

Pete77 said:


> Iit just caused the machine to keep rebooting


This is because checksetrgb.sh is designed to reboot the machine if setrgb.sh failed to set the colour or luminosity due to a hang in iicset. Did you look at the code?

However, iicsetw doesn't suffer from this problem so checksetrgb.sh is now pretty much redundant and I have removed the attachment to prevent anybody else using it undavisedly. I was going to edit the post as well, but that's in the archive so it's readonly


----------



## blindlemon

Pete77 said:


> Iit just caused the machine to keep rebooting


This is because checksetrgb.sh is designed to reboot the machine if setrgb.sh failed to set the colour or luminosity due to a hang in iicset. Did you look at the code?

However, iicsetw doesn't suffer from this problem so checksetrgb.sh is now pretty much redundant.

I would have edited my original post and removed the attachment to prevent anybody else using it undavisedly, but the thread is now archived so I can't - mods, can you help with this?


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> This is because checksetrgb.sh is designed to reboot the machine if setrgb.sh failed to set the colour or luminosity due to a hang in iicset. Did you look at the code?
> 
> However, iicsetw doesn't suffer from this problem so checksetrgb.sh is now pretty much redundant.


So in my rc.sysinit.author.edit file edited via Startup Editor you would only recommend having the line that calls the setrgb.sh script and checksetrgb.sh script is unnecessary now? Also what about the sleep time before it runs which seemed to be a critical factor?

I only have iicsetw plus iicsetw.c files in my /var/hack/bin directory and I don't have iicset anywhere. Do I need iicsetw.c? It came in the zip file with iicsetw.

I wonder if checksetrgb.sh was looking for iicsetw in the wrong directory or something and so failing. Must have a look at the code and try and work out.

Any recommendations on the best settings for use with a 4:3 29" CRT display with 100hz digital scan (turning 100hz digital scan off makes the picture a lot worse contrary to what sanderton expected).


----------



## blindlemon

Checksetrgb.sh is now redundant as I have never seen iicsetw hang, so you can remove it. There's no harm leaving the sleep time, although IIRC that was most likely also introduced to try to avoid a hang in iicset.

You only need to use setrgb.sh in the first place if you are a) using RBG and b) the colour and/or contrast from your TiVo are too overblown for your TV. This is less likely to be a problem with a good CRT, IMHO, than with a plasma/LCD as CRTs have a higher contrast range anyway. 

I can't advise the 'best' settings as all TiVos seem to be slightly different and the optimum setting will depend on the signal coming from your STB, your TiVo and your TV. If you aren't happy with the results then try reducing the contrast/luminosity value in setrgb.sh by 1 or 2 and rebooting. If it looks better then keep it or reduce the value some more; if it looks worse then put it back as it was. Only you can tell.


----------



## sanderton

Pete77 said:


> As Tivo only trust CATV for Mode2 rather than Mode 4 shouldn't a lower Max bit rate be used here than for satellite?.


FWIW, I think CATV being set to Mode 2 is a mistake, probaly because they initially tested it using an analogye cable boxes RF input. Same as VBR not being active!


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> You only need to use setrgb.sh in the first place if you are a) using RBG and b) the colour and/or contrast from your TiVo are too overblown for your TV. This is less likely to be a problem with a good CRT, IMHO, than with a plasma/LCD as CRTs have a higher contrast range anyway.


Got it working now and I really can't any longer tell a difference between the Tivo live buffer and the direct feed from the Sky box using Aux. Before I got setrgb.sh working there was quite a significant different with the Tivo live buffer being a lot more saturated and overblown.

Presumably setrgb.fl is only a temporary flag file created while the setrgb.sh script file is running?

Any views on what is the maximum acceptable ratio between the VBR Bitrate and the Max Bitrate is for each quality setting? Your recommended Medium setting ratio is over 2:1 so presumably no reson why 1700000 and 3400000 wouldn't be acceptable for Basic and Mode 1? Or would that stress the encoder too much for some reason? Is 9000000 considered to be the largest Max bitrate the encoder can run without a danger of frying it or is safe Max Bitrate for the encoder also dependent on the Mode the encoder is running in? So would 3400000 still place it under a lot of demand in Mode 1? Also presumably a high Max bitrate is more acceptable with VBR as long as the VBR rate is considerably lower than the Max bitrate?


----------



## Pete77

sanderton said:


> FWIW, I think CATV being set to Mode 2 is a mistake, probaly because they initially tested it using an analogye cable boxes RF input. Same as VBR not being active!


If they really believed they should be using Mode 2 for CATV/Freeview etc then their Bitrate settings ought to have been lower than those they use for Mode 4 on satellite I agree.

For what its worth 7500000/9000000 is giving me no white flashes at all on my satellite box feed even on BBC1 but is giving me white flashes on various Freeview box channels as I have a dual feed setup. Of course my Freeview box is coming in via the RF socket (and a standalone Scart to RF modulator before that) which obviously vastly reduces quality and probably does point in the direct of my using only Mode 2 and lower bit rate settings for Freeview? I agree that for those with only a Freeview box and a Scart feed the settings can probably be as high as for satellite.


----------



## blindlemon

IMHO the encoder will only get stressed (if indeed such a concept is valid) when it's required to run at a very high bitrate. 

With VBR the bitrate varies around (including lower than) the VBRBitrate setting, going up to the MaxBitrate value only in moment of extreme need. Therefore using VBR at all will almost certainly cause the encoder to run at much lass than the maximum bitrate for 99% of the time. 

Just choose values that give you an acceptable tradeoff between PQ and filesize. The ones mentioned in this thread work for many people but aren't by any means prescriptive - so tinker away and enjoy!


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> Just choose values that give you an acceptable tradeoff between PQ and filesize. The ones mentioned in this thread work for many people but aren't by any means prescriptive - so tinker away and enjoy!


As a confirmed Basic man I rather like the idea of giving it a significantly higher Max BitRate so that any blockiness is reduced or avoided. Its obviously a sad commentary on my eyesight that I don't regard Basic's blurryness when viewing on a 29" CRT is unacceptable. Ultimately I clearly need those 2 x 500Gb hard drives so I can record more stuff in Mode 0 and still keep a large program choice on tap.

Any idea about Mode 3 and whether it actually exists or not and if not why not?

It rather appears Tivo UK must have decided to stick us with only CBR perhaps so that there weren't any awkward questions to customer services about the number of hours estimated for the various program qualities and them not actually synching up with the actual number of hours recorded?

Well that seems to leave me with only replacing the power supply left as an upgrade unless I fancy trying to tackle the DailyMailJazz or Digiguide comparison modules, both of which appear to be far more trouble than they are actually worth to get working and to maintain in comparison to the use I would actually get out of them. Compare that with Highlights which is just such a brilliant module that I get so much use out of that I can't even begin to sing the praises of its author highly enough. :up: :up: :up:


----------



## Pete77

During tonight's live showing of Two Pints..... on BBC Three 115 on Sky the white flashes were appearing very regularly at the bottom of the screen but I have not seen them on any other Sky channel up to now. However I really can't think how you guys could possibly imagine these flashes are worth suffering for a very small uplift in absolute picture quality from Mode 4 Best. Obviously Tivo had their reasons for not offering Mode 0 although I suppose lack of disk space could obviously have been a serious consideration at the time of product design.

I will try lowering my Mode 0 VBR rate from 7500000 to 450000 while leaving the Max Bitrate at 9000000 in line with a suggestion made by another forum member for getting rid of the white flashes. It is very windy here tonight but that really shouldn't affect the communal Sky dish which is in a very well sheltered position up on a roof valley here. It would be affecting the conventional aerial supporting Freeview which is on the top of a huge and rickety pole.

My improved Basic mode at 1700000/2300000 Mode 1 seems to be running faultlessly with no significant increase in file size (less than 5%) compared to standard Basic but with a noticeable elimination of any blocking tendencies on fast motion.


----------



## blindlemon

The low bitrates on BBC3 combined with the digital sharpening the BBC always seem to apply to their channels will be what's causing your white flashes. 

Lowering your VBRBitrate that far at Best will definitely impact the baseline quality of the recording, although if you've lived with Basic for all these years I don't suppose you'll notice it. 

If you haven't seen any white flashes on other channels then you will appreciate how it's not difficult for those of us who very rarely watch BBC3 to 'live' with them


----------



## Pete77

blindlemon said:


> The low bitrates on BBC3 combined with the digital sharpening the BBC always seem to apply to their channels will be what's causing your white flashes.
> 
> If you haven't seen any white flashes on other channels then you will appreciate how it's not difficult for those of us who very rarely watch BBC3 to 'live' with them


Would that be the same BBC who said they couldn't fit full screen BBC Parliament on Freeview because of the need to protect perfect picture quality.  

I don't actually watch much BBC Three or the Two Pints program normally but I do record quite a bit of stuff on BBC Four. Is that probably also low bitrate and affected by the white flashes problem then? I would have thought that on digital satellite there was enough bandwidth available for adequate bitrates compared to Freeview?


----------



## hbls00190

Hi there. I've been running Mode0 on my Tivo for just on a year now. At the start of the month I got a spanky nice 40" hi def sony telly. But I've noticed that the picture from sky as seen through the tivo is slightly "zoomed". Basically, using the same piccy on sky, the Tivo has the same bottom and left edges. But the top appears about a finger's width below where it should be. So there's about a finger's width of content off the top of the screen. This makes the whole screen look like it is slightly zoomed in. I'm using LJ's fpga fix, but was wondering if any of the registers can adjust the "top" of the screen and leave the "bottom" where is is..? Any help appreciated! Ta!


----------



## markabuckley

no zoom problems .. BUT

have noticed a HUGE difference in number of white flashes since moving the Tivo out of the AV cabinet and into "free air" ....

internal temp has dropped from 44C to 33C average


----------



## ciper

Does anyone know the right bitrate to use for Mode0 to best match a DVD?


----------

