# Anyone know how to insert a paused location?



## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

Wierd problem, and I'll spare you most of the details.

I have an unreplaceable recording that I'm trying to preserve, but it won't play and it won't transfer (not via MRV nor by using IE and the unsupported webserver). There is a brief spot of "garbage" at the beginning of the recording which I'm certain is what causes TiVo to say "I can't play this" or "no signal" or some such nonsense.

It's important to point out that the recording IS actually okay, this problem only started after an upgrade and prior to that it played fine.

I'm pretty sure if I could edit the right field in MFS for this recording and insert a paused location (I'm told this is in the form of an offset, a number of seconds into the show) that I could transfer from the paused location without a problem.

So, does anyone have any clue how to create a paused location in the MFS database? Long shot, I know.


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

ddonohue said:


> Wierd problem, and I'll spare you most of the details.
> 
> I have an unreplaceable recording that I'm trying to preserve, but it won't play and it won't transfer (not via MRV nor by using IE and the unsupported webserver). There is a brief spot of "garbage" at the beginning of the recording which I'm certain is what causes TiVo to say "I can't play this" or "no signal" or some such nonsense.
> 
> ...


The devil is in the details.
What makes you believe that the recording is still intact?
Is this the ONLY recording that went bad?


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

I think (I am not sure) that you can craft a request to transfer from any point, not just the stored paused point. If you look at the XML, recordings with a paused point show a non-zero "ByteOffset". I believe this value is just passed back in the transfer request, but I don't yet know the syntax for that. Anyway, knowing the syntax, you should be able to use it with a different value.


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

BTUx9 said:


> The devil is in the details.
> What makes you believe that the recording is still intact?
> Is this the ONLY recording that went bad?


Yes, all good questions. There were two recordings that went bad right after the same upgrade, but one is not important. And I was able to watch the one that I'm trying to preserve AFTER the upgrade, because it just so happened that it had been paused a few minutes in and I was able to play from that point. Once I allowed it to play to the end, it no longer starts.

I'm not surprised exactly, because the setup at the time was using an IR controller to change the channel on a fairly ancient cable box. Kludgy, and there was a fairly noticeable "header" of garbage as the channel changed. My hypothesis is that TiVo is seeing this as some sort of corruption and throwing in the towel too quickly. And by the way, both bad recordings were from the same local digital channel.

And here's a further interesting wrinkle - I originally didn't recognize the upgrade as the culprit, I just thought the recording got hosed. But I thought I was safe because I happened to have second, smaller drive with the same recording on it. This was the original which I had taken out and imaged to a larger drive. So I put the old drive in, powered up and, you guessed it... TiVo forced an upgrade and the same two recordings blew up! It was at that point that I was fairly sure the upgrade was the culprit.


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

wmcbrine said:


> I think (I am not sure) that you can craft a request to transfer from any point, not just the stored paused point. If you look at the XML, recordings with a paused point show a non-zero "ByteOffset". I believe this value is just passed back in the transfer request, but I don't yet know the syntax for that. Anyway, knowing the syntax, you should be able to use it with a different value.


Now this is a very interesting concept. Hadn't thought of that. Where can I learn some more about this?

EDIT: Did a little digging but still not up to speed on this. But I see there is another field that is sometimes present called "PausePointTime"??? What's that about?


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

After playing with this a bit, I suspect that it will only work in MRV mode, and not with TTG. Which is a problem, because tivodecode won't decrypt MRV-extracted files, nor do I know of another way to handle them.


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

If it were garbage at the beginning of the recording, I wouldn't expect 3 recordings to go at the same time.

I strongly suspect it's an encryption issue, and I'm afraid the fact that it worked originally from the paused location may be something of a fluke, and not easily reproducible (if at all).

Unfortunately, I don't really know much about the multiple keys used in standalones, so I'm afraid I won't be of much help.


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

BTUx9 said:


> I strongly suspect it's an encryption issue, and I'm afraid the fact that it worked originally from the paused location may be something of a fluke, and not easily reproducible (if at all).


I can see that, but if that were the case, would the error message I receive when attempting to play the recording be

"Error playing a recording.

The Recorder was not able to record this program because there was no video signal on the channel. You may have been trying to record on a channel that you don't receive"?

I would expect TiVo to be able to deal with an encryption issue a little more gracefully. Maybe not.


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## ddonohue (Dec 7, 2003)

wmcbrine said:


> After playing with this a bit, I suspect that it will only work in MRV mode, and not with TTG. Which is a problem, because tivodecode won't decrypt MRV-extracted files, nor do I know of another way to handle them.


Not exactly sure I grasp this entirely (haven't had my coffee yet), but I have 2 Series 2's readily available so if you're implying that there's a way to pull from TiVo to TiVo for MRV using the offset, as opposed to pulling to PC with TTG, that's still on the table.

Would we then end up with a copy on the 2nd TiVo (minus the first minute or so) that TTG would like? Hmmm, could be! But I'd need some guidance there.


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## Thom (Jun 5, 2000)

When I've hit a bad spot that prevented playback of a recording, I've been able to jump past it with the jump to end button, then scan backwards through the file until I hit the opposite side of the bad spot. Try pressing play then immediately press jump. If you're playing the last minute, scan backward.

If you can't do this, try using WinMFS or MFSLive to copy the original drive to a new drive. This copy action might repair it enough to where you can play it.


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## AlleyAndy (Feb 2, 2009)

[So I put the old drive in, powered up and, you guessed it... TiVo forced an upgrade and the same two recordings blew up! ...]

Well, too late for this bit of advice, but... Whenever there's a problem, make a backup of the drive first, then experiment with the backup. In this case, once you figured out that the upgrade was causing the problem, you might have been able to disconnect the Tivo from the network long enough to copy off this file. 

But it's not too late to protect what you now have, so I'd advise first making a backup of whichever drive you're experimenting with, then play with the backup instead.

Now, if this were a regular data drive, I would be pretty confident that we could recover the file. This being a Tivo drive, though, I don't know the details of how the video files are stored.

But, data is data, so...

It sounds to me that the beginning of the file may not actually be corrupted, but in fact has some bad video at start. I'm thinking that the previous software rev you had ignored it, but when the new version was "improved" it now considers that the whole recording must be bad if the first part of it is bad.

Again, if this were a data drive, I'd use a drive bit editor, find the file on the drive, and copy some known good data in place of the "bad" data at the beginning of the file. Unfortunately, I don't know how to find the physical location of a video file on a Tivo drive 

Another way would be to use whatever means possible to copy the file to another drive, even if that means copying it into some other format. Once isolated on another drive, it might then be playable, or you might need to copy some "good" video to the beginning of the file.

I've spent days successfully recovering data files that were on bad drives. I wish I had a copy of your drive in front of me. This would be a great challenge!


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