# Tivo Premiere + Network Attached Storage



## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

I've seen similar threads in other parts of the forum but I do not believe there is one specifically relating to the Tivo Premiere:

I'm looking to buy network attached storage drive and was hoping to share the media on this drive with my TiVo Premiere. EDIT: Clarification - I will have video files on the NES and wish to playback on the TiVo.

Has anyone done this successfully? I know that the premiere can stream music from a networked PC but can it stream HD video from a network device?


I'm still in the market, if anyone has any suggestions. I'm looking for something with RAID capabilities, at least 4 bays, and can handle streaming HD video.

Thanks!


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## chashd (Nov 25, 2006)

I have done it, and it is AWESOME! There was a great thread a while ago explaining a fairly straightforward way to do it. You need to download pytivo to your pc. There are instructions how to make the Tivo see all your media on your pc. 

You then rip your DVDs to your pc using third party software. Once this is finished, create folders to organize. Movies, cartoons, kids, etc... 

To watch a movie, you select it from the folder and the Tivo begins to download its hard drive. If you have an Ethernet connection, the download is quick and you can begin to watch immediately. Once it is fully downloaded, it stays on your Tivo. To save space however, once I finish watching I delete it and just redownload it when I want to.

I know this is a brief explanation, but there are better threads explaining how to get it set up. 

Needless to say, this is a fantastic way to store content!


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## chashd (Nov 25, 2006)

Also, I have only done this with standard DVDs. I don't see why this wouldn't work with HD files though, except for the larger storage. DVD movies look great on the TiVo, and I don't notice any loss in quality.


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## janry (Jan 2, 2003)

You may find the Netgear ReadyNAS of interest as it is easily recognized by TiVo DVRs.

http://www.readynas.com/?p=4324


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

chashd said:


> I have done it, and it is AWESOME!


What NAS are you using? ReadyNAS by Netgear? That is the drive I was looking at. I was hoping to find a solution a bit cheaper though... Glad to hear that it IS possible. Makes me feel better about buying one.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

Currently the ReadyNAS by Netgear is the only one I know of that supports TiVo's Home Media Option (HMO) out of the box. So there is no PC needed. Other NASes can be hacked to run Galleon or pyTivo and they work well too. That is what I have done with a Buffalo Linkstation. There are other options that can also be reasonably easily updated to support your DVR, such as the Pogo Plug. 

If you keep the PC on and are willing to use it as the server, then any NAS that the PC can access can be used to store the video and audio. If you go the PC route you have many choices of server software to use so check out the Home Media Features and TiVo ToGo forum for threads on the various options.

For dead simple setup and use with no need to add software to anything, the ReadyNAS is the way to go.


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

Alright, thanks for the info. I am definitely looking for a PC-free solution. That is the main reason I bought the tivo in the first place. I use it mostly to watch Netflix which I wanted to do without my PC (laptop) having to be on and hooked up.

I'm looking at ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus.

How difficult is it to make another NAS run Galleon or pyTivo? I still want the drive to be read/writable via FTP or internet browser.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

brodie4416 said:


> Alright, thanks for the info. I am definitely looking for a PC-free solution. That is the main reason I bought the tivo in the first place. I use it mostly to watch Netflix which I wanted to do without my PC (laptop) having to be on and hooked up.
> 
> I'm looking at ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus.
> 
> How difficult is it to make another NAS run Galleon or pyTivo? I still want the drive to be read/writable via FTP or internet browser.


To hack a Buffalo NAS go to buffalo.nas-central.org and check out the various hacks there. It's a big site and my page is very out of date, but I know of a page for installing Galleon and I think another for pyTivo.

For more general links from there you can visit http://nas-central.org/ I haven't visited there for a while, so I am not sure how current it is.


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## news4me2 (Jul 10, 2010)

brodie4416 said:


> What NAS are you using? ReadyNAS by Netgear? That is the drive I was looking at. I was hoping to find a solution a bit cheaper though... Glad to hear that it IS possible. Makes me feel better about buying one.


I recently picked up the smaller ReadyNAS Ultra 2. Allows any of the TIVO's in my house to pull my Videos, Music, and Photos from a central location.. The Ultra will download any TIVO recorded show marked as KUID (Keep Until I Delete). I only wish I could get the Tivo's to stream from the Ultra instead of having to transfer the videos before playing.

You are right about the price... these are a bit steep in comparison to competitive products.


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

Well I'm willing to pay the price if it is going to last. I've heard horror stories about NAS that fail and result in complete data loss and the NAS not under warranty. I shall continue research.

Thanks


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

Bear in mind that the ReadyNAS solution is a bit of a kludge. You have to mark your videos and KUID and the Ready Nas will copy them over automatically. Once there, they are served back to your tivo ala pytivo or tivo desktop - so in that regard it is nothing special. I bought this device in the hopes that it would meet my needs, and frankly it didn't - I disabled the netgear software, although maybe by now the bugs have been fixed. One nice thing about the ready nas - it is an open linux platform. I was able to get pytivo, ffmpeg, and tivodecode all working there, so now my pytivo server is running 24/7.


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

The ReadyNAS was not able to transfer automatically? I had this image in my mind of the TiVo having a shortcut of some sort in Now Playing (similar to the netflix shortcut) that would send me to browse the hard drive, able to play any video in any format directly on the TiVo. Is this inaccurate?


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## magnus (Nov 12, 2004)

brodie4416 said:


> The ReadyNAS was not able to transfer automatically? I had this image in my mind of the TiVo having a shortcut of some sort in Now Playing (similar to the netflix shortcut) that would send me to browse the hard drive, able to play any video in any format directly on the TiVo. Is this inaccurate?


It will indeed have a shortcut in NPL. From there you can transfer any .TiVo file.


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## danjw1 (Sep 13, 2005)

For files that aren't .Tivo, you can set a folder to "Auto Transfer" to the Tivo in Tivo Desktop, this preserves the sub folder name. This could be a folder you have mapped on your desktop to the NAS. Also, you can tell Tivo Desktop to auto transfer a show off the tivo to the computer, again you can set this to a folder that is mapped from the NAS. This does mean you will be using CPU and network bandwidth on the computer.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

jbernardis said:


> Once there, they are served back to your tivo ala pytivo or tivo desktop - so in that regard it is nothing special. I bought this device in the hopes that it would meet my needs, and frankly it didn't - I disabled the netgear software, although maybe by now the bugs have been fixed. One nice thing about the ready nas - it is an open linux platform. I was able to get pytivo, ffmpeg, and tivodecode all working there, so now my pytivo server is running 24/7.


Is your unit older? The newer ones don't need TiVo Desktop at all, they can serve back to the DVR directly.


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

I didn't say they needed tivo desktop - I meant that they serve videos to tivo just like tivo desktop or pytivo - nothing special there.

My point was that the selling feature of the readynas was its ability to copy programs from the tivo automatically - getting videos back to the tivo was nothing revolutionary.

I found the main selling feature so inadequate that I disabled it. Don't get me wrong - I live my readynas - because of its openness, I was able to develop my own solution that works quite well for me.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

Thanks for clarifying, it sure sounded like you were saying it needed TiVo Desktop or PyTivo to work.

Yes, these open NAS boxes are nice. Did you post a howto so others can duplicate your accomplishment? That's what the NAS-Central Wiki's are for. If so, you could post a link here for others to find and copy what you did. My next NAS is likely to be a ReadyNAS so I would love to duplicate your setup if it is enough better.


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

I'll have to dig through my notes to see if I can find the history of what I did. I've replaced my PC since I did it, and might have lost some history.

Getting pytivo itself to work was no big deal - python is fairly portable. The difficulty was getting ffmpeg and tivodecode/tdcat working. There was a version of ffmpeg that was available from the package manager, but it was too old. I had to download the source from the official site and build it. Of course this meant that I had to install packages for development and a bunch of libraries. Everytime I entered apt-get, I was cringing - thinking that I was destroying my NAS, but everything worked out OK, and I couldn't be happier with the end result.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

jbernardis said:


> Everytime I entered apt-get, I was cringing - thinking that I was destroying my NAS, but everything worked out OK, and I couldn't be happier with the end result.


I know that feeling well.

I never did get FFMPEG and TiVo Decode working on my linky, but it was probably 18 months or more ago when I tried. Things might be better now, I guess I should give it a new run.


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

Just want to confirm I have simplified this correctly: It is possible to have the 'same' connectivity between the TiVo Premiere and the NAS with the ReadyNAS as well as any other NAS, but the ReadyNAS is the only one that is ready to work with TiVo right out of the box?

And when I say "connectivity between TiVo and NAS" I mean the TiVo can store recordings on the NAS *and *can stream/copy-to-HDD any video files (MPEG and other codecs) stored on the NAS for instant playing on the TV.

I am not familiar with pyTiVo or anything like that so would it be worth my money to just get the ReadyNAS? I'm looking at the ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus because it has the duo processor, which I figure will be worth it since I intend to copy/stream HD video files.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

brodie4416 said:


> Just want to confirm I have simplified this correctly: It is possible to have the 'same' connectivity between the TiVo Premiere and the NAS with the ReadyNAS as well as any other NAS, but the ReadyNAS is the only one that is ready to work with TiVo right out of the box?


Yes



> And when I say "connectivity between TiVo and NAS" I mean the TiVo can store recordings on the NAS *and *can stream/copy-to-HDD any video files (MPEG and other codecs) stored on the NAS for instant playing on the TV.


Not quite. The NAS can be set to copy recordings from the DVR. You can then delete them yourself after you confirm they made it there. The DVR can copy programs back from the NAS, which is not technically streaming since the file will remain on the DVR and would need to be manually erased. On the other hand you can pretty much start watching while it is copying which is very much like streaming. Also, the programs need to be either TiVo files or other MPEG-2 files that the DVR knows how to play natively. TiVo's HMO protocol won't handle other codecs to the best of my knowledge and the NAS does not have processing power to transcode quickly.



> I am not familiar with pyTiVo or anything like that so would it be worth my money to just get the ReadyNAS? I'm looking at the ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus because it has the duo processor, which I figure will be worth it since I intend to copy/stream HD video files.


If you want transcoding to play something other than MPEG-2 or if you really want a STREAM going to the DVR that won't leave a file behind, you will need one of these other programs running on a PC. The PC has the power to transcode and can host software that can stream. If you use PC software, the files can of course reside on the NAS.

Even with dual processors, I don't think that NAS has the processing power to do serious transcoding. Some people put pyTivo on a NAS, I have, but I don't transcode with it. The transcoding rate on my linkstation was reported by another user to be about 2 to 3 frames per second of video. (if I recall correctly, it might be much slower) So it would take pyTiVo over a day to transcode and serve a show to the DVR. Your dual processor would be faster, perhaps only taking 10 hour or so to send a 2 hour movie. The solution is to pre-transcode the file to MPEG-2 on the PC and then save it on the NAS.


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

I have the smaller of the readynas'es - 4 bays instead of 6 - and I understand it has a less powerful processor than the other, but I am happy with it's ability to transcode. I can't speak for other devices, but my experience has been that transcoding times have been just about real time - maybe a little slower. This is quite acceptable to me - it can even be used for streaming if you give it a bit of a head start. While transcoding, I used "top" to analyze cpu utilization, and never saw the NAS taxed beyond its ability to do its primary function.


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

Thanks! Really great responst, btw.



CuriousMark said:


> The solution is to pre-transcode the file to MPEG-2 on the PC and then save it on the NAS.


So you are saying I can have a PC dedicated to transcoding the files to MPEG-2 whenever the TiVo tries to access one of the files, or I should convert the files to MPEG-2 before storing on the NAS?


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

jbernardis said:


> I have the smaller of the readynas'es - 4 bays instead of 6 - and I understand it has a less powerful processor than the other, but I am happy with it's ability to transcode. I can't speak for other devices, but my experience has been that transcoding times have been just about real time - maybe a little slower. This is quite acceptable to me - it can even be used for streaming if you give it a bit of a head start. While transcoding, I used "top" to analyze cpu utilization, and never saw the NAS taxed beyond its ability to do its primary function.


You are using the ReadyNAS to transcode instantly? Is there any software required for that or is the ReadyNAS ready to do this out of the box? If you it requires additional software, what are you using?


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

jbernardis said:


> I have the smaller of the readynas'es - 4 bays instead of 6 - and I understand it has a less powerful processor than the other, but I am happy with it's ability to transcode. I can't speak for other devices, but my experience has been that transcoding times have been just about real time - maybe a little slower. This is quite acceptable to me - it can even be used for streaming if you give it a bit of a head start. While transcoding, I used "top" to analyze cpu utilization, and never saw the NAS taxed beyond its ability to do its primary function.


Thank you for proving me wrong. That is amazing to me, based on reports of Linkstations taking a full day to transcode a 2 hour movie, I never tried. It might be time to trade that in on a readynas.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

brodie4416 said:


> Thanks! Really great responst, btw.
> 
> So you are saying I can have a PC dedicated to transcoding the files to MPEG-2 whenever the TiVo tries to access one of the files, or I should convert the files to MPEG-2 before storing on the NAS?


You are welcome, but as you see, time marches on and some of the things I thought I new to be true no longer are.

What I was suggesting, and what I do is when I get a file in an MPEG-4 or other format my series 2 TiVo won't understand, I transcode it on the PC and then save it to the NAS. From there the TiVo pulls it without problem. The transcode takes a minute or two on my PC, so it is really just a step in moving it to where I want it saved after I have downloaded from wherever I originally got it.


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## CuriousMark (Jan 13, 2005)

CuriousMark said:


> Thank you for proving me wrong. That is amazing to me, based on reports of Linkstations taking a full day to transcode a 2 hour movie, I never tried. It might be time to trade that in on a readynas.


Read jbernardis post farther up. He modified his readyNAS and added pyTivo to it. It does not transcode out of the box. The modification is bit confusing if you are not familiar with Linux and the various tools, but is not too hard for a hobbyist.

There are several different setups being talked about in various reply posts in this thread. That is why I tried so hard to limit things to an out-of-the-box point of view in my responses to you. It seemed to me that was closest to what you want to do. If I am wrong and you are interested in hacking your NAS, then other interesting options, like transcoding in the NAS, open up. It is also fun, but can be nerve wracking if you aren't absolutely sure of what you are doing.


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## brodie4416 (Oct 6, 2006)

jbernardis said:


> I'll have to dig through my notes to see if I can find the history of what I did. I've replaced my PC since I did it, and might have lost some history.


I would be interested if you can find anything. Sounds like something I want to do, but I find it unlikely I will be able to do so without guidance!


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

brodie4416 said:


> You are using the ReadyNAS to transcode instantly? Is there any software required for that or is the ReadyNAS ready to do this out of the box? If you it requires additional software, what are you using?


no - this is not a native capability - I am running pytivo on my readynas which in turn uses ffmpeg to do the actual transcoding.


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

CuriousMark said:


> It is also fun, but can be nerve wracking if you aren't absolutely sure of what you are doing.


Wise words!!!! I am a software engineer by profession, and this was daunting to me.

As far as my notes for what I did here, look at this thread, starting at post number 73:http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=452287&highlight=readynas&page=3


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

Bear in mind that one other - Thom Coleman, tried to follow my instructions and as far as I know has not yet been successful.


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## sansom (Mar 14, 2010)

jbernardis said:


> Getting pytivo itself to work was no big deal - python is fairly portable. The difficulty was getting ffmpeg and tivodecode/tdcat working. There was a version of ffmpeg that was available from the package manager, but it was too old. I had to download the source from the official site and build it. Of course this meant that I had to install packages for development and a bunch of libraries. Everytime I entered apt-get, I was cringing - thinking that I was destroying my NAS, but everything worked out OK, and I couldn't be happier with the end result.


PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE can you give me your sources and the basic steps you took? I want to do this exact thing with my ReadyNAS Ultra!


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## jbernardis (Oct 22, 2003)

sansom said:


> PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE can you give me your sources and the basic steps you took? I want to do this exact thing with my ReadyNAS Ultra!


There is a link to my instructions right here in post number 30. I'll repost the same link here.

As far as sources are concerned, That link gives you further links to where I got the source code from.


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