# Tivo - Mac



## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

I have a Series 1 UK Tivo, and I'm wanting to get some recordings in Now Playing, into my Mac (Powermac G5, 10.5.1 [Leopard]). I'll then store them for archiving, burn DVDs, put them on my iPhone/iPod etc., so it should be able to encode in mp4.

What is the cheapest option to do this? My Tivo is in the next room, a few meters away.

Thanks for any help!


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

First you need to install a network card in your TiVo (you'll need access to a PC to do this.)

After that it's a banned topic for discussion, but Google "TySuiteJ"


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## martink0646 (Feb 8, 2005)

Edit: Sorry, got sidetracked whilst replying

Hi,

Everything you want to do is possible............but we can't talk about it here, Forum rules I'm afraid. To get the info you need you can goto http://www.deald*t*b*se.com where they have all the answers you'll need. As for cost you will probably need a network card & some encoding software & that should do you, assuming you have a network at home to connect TiVo to your MAC. For a PC the encoding software can be picked up for free but I don't know about the MAC. For a network card, there are a few suppliers on this forum & it's best to keep it in the family. www.tivoheaven.co.uk has probably got them in stock but you can also try www.tivoland.com or www.tivocentral.co.uk who are all regular forum users who have good reps & are v.helpful.

Martin


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

Thanks for the help guys, I'll check all the links out!


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

MarkW19 said:


> Thanks for the help guys, I'll check all the links out!


Hi fellow MAC person! Welcome.

There are several of us MAC people here. There was a great tool called TiVoTool (v0.5.7) that was the Poodles-Plums for performing the practice that we're not allowed to speak of. However, since the release of Leopard this version stopped working. The author has had a stab at 0.7.1 however, its pretty buggy at the moment. So your next fallback is TySuiteJ, however, be warned its a bl**dy nightmare to configure.

Anyhow, get your network card sorted first and install all of the 'gubbins' such as FTP etc etc (however, I'd get a copy of Hooch from TiVo Heaven and prep up a large HD with all of the necessary stuff pre-installed on it). Once you're all up and running give us a shout. Oh and when you TELNET into your TiVo from the OSX Terminal use TELNET -K xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx this stops the 'echo' of your keystrokes.

Have fun!


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

PaulWilkinsUK said:


> Hi fellow MAC person! Welcome.
> 
> There are several of us MAC people here. There was a great tool called TiVoTool (v0.5.7) that was the Poodles-Plums for performing the practice that we're not allowed to speak of. However, since the release of Leopard this version stopped working. The author has had a stab at 0.7.1 however, its pretty buggy at the moment. So your next fallback is TySuiteJ, however, be warned its a bl**dy nightmare to configure.
> 
> ...


Great, thanks!

It makes sense to get a new larger HD at the same time, and have it preloaded with all the needed stuff. If I get a pre-installed HD, does that mean all I have to do is install the new HD (easy, I guess?), install the cachecard, connect to my router via Ethernet, and then use a piece of software. Is there nothing else I'll need to do? I read you need to configure it with a PC, but with everything been installed for me on the new HD, does that remove that step for me?

How easy is installing the actual cachecard, and how easy is it to mess things up inside the Tivo?! Also, do I have to install some RAM in the cachecard, or can I just leave it empty?

Will this also let me use TivoWeb and the other hacks (softpadding, mode0, etc.) from my Mac?

The only thing about spending more money on my Tivo, is that once something goes wrong, it'll be expensive/difficult to repair. So I'm a little reluctant to spend so much money on it. Still, I love it, and there's nothing else that comes close yet.

Oh and, before I put the new HD in my Tivo, can I take out my current one and transfer all the files onto the new one (Now Playing shows, settings, to-do list, season passes etc.), by putting it in my G5 tower (non-intel) and just copying the data onto the new drive?

Thanks!


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## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

You'll find a fair bit by searching this forum and the wibbly-wobbly-web in general



MarkW19 said:


> It makes sense to get a new larger HD at the same time, and have it preloaded with all the needed stuff. If I get a pre-installed HD, does that mean all I have to do is install the new HD (easy, I guess?), install the cachecard, connect to my router via Ethernet, and then use a piece of software. Is there nothing else I'll need to do? I read you need to configure it with a PC, but with everything been installed for me on the new HD, does that remove that step for me?


Yup. Plug in configured drive, add cachecard, power on, access.



MarkW19 said:


> How easy is installing the actual cachecard, and how easy is it to mess things up inside the Tivo?! Also, do I have to install some RAM in the cachecard, or can I just leave it empty?


Easy-sh to install. It's a bit of a tight fit, but if you remove the foot from the TiVo you'll find it goes in much more easily. Having gigantic man-hands can make it tricky, so try and find a woman or small child 



MarkW19 said:


> Will this also let me use TivoWeb and the other hacks (softpadding, mode0, etc.) from my Mac?


Yup. Once you've got net access it's simple to just FTP across what you want and then access via the browser / telnet



MarkW19 said:


> Oh and, before I put the new HD in my Tivo, can I take out my current one and transfer all the files onto the new one (Now Playing shows, settings, to-do list, season passes etc.), by putting it in my G5 tower (non-intel) and just copying the data onto the new drive?


Hmmm.... I don't think so, no. Usually you need a PC running Linux (from a boot disc).
You can transfer your recordings, season passes, etc. But you'll need access to a PC. You can sent the off to http://www.tivoheaven.co.uk/ or another supplier and they'll copy and configure it all for you.

It's easier to send the disk off - if you can live without your TiVo for a few days. But it's much more fun to do it yourself.


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

Cheers. It's all making sense now 

How quickly would say a 2hour movie be transferred to my Mac, at Best quality?

Also, is it possible to make a script on my Mac that will transfer the contents of Now Playing automatically, every night? Does the Tivo have to be on for this (green)?

And, I don't see why I couldn't copy the contents of my old drive to my new one, if they physically connect to and mount on my Mac? I'll keep the file hierarchy intact. Unless the files are hidden or something?!

Thanks for all the help.


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

MarkW19 said:


> How quickly would say a 2hour movie be transferred to my Mac, at Best quality?


 In my experience it would take around 1~1.5 hours, TiVo was never designed to do the things we demand from it now and processor speed is a little limited.



MarkW19 said:


> Also, is it possible to make a script on my Mac that will transfer the contents of Now Playing automatically, every night? Does the Tivo have to be on for this (green)?


Now that is an interesting idea! I guess you could you apple script to interact with TYSuiteJ or TivoTool (when it ever gets finished). I might have a play myself....



MarkW19 said:


> And, I don't see why I couldn't copy the contents of my old drive to my new one, if they physically connect to and mount on my Mac? I'll keep the file hierarchy intact. Unless the files are hidden or something?!


Well, I tried mounting it under OSX but it just moaned and said the drive wasnt formatted. If you're a unix whizz (which I aint) then perhaps it might be possible to mount it under OSX Terminal, but the problem is that there are all sorts of mucking about you have to do to the drive config to get the effin thing to work. Really the simplest thing to do is pop the drive in the post to one of the pre-mentioned service providers and let them to the hard work for you or if you don't mind losing what you have get a pre-config'ed one. Personally, I use TiVo Heaven, why?, coz they're 30 mins down the road from me and if anything goes wrong I can pop round and proffer violence  _(Only jokin' Steve!!)_


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## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

MarkW19 said:


> How quickly would say a 2hour movie be transferred to my Mac, at Best quality?


I've got a movie which is 4845MB - Gangs of New York, if you're interested - it transferred in around 40 minutes. It does depend on the quality of your network, naturally.



MarkW19 said:


> Also, is it possible to make a script on my Mac that will transfer the contents of Now Playing automatically, every night? Does the Tivo have to be on for this (green)?


If you're handy with AppleScript etc, it shouldn't be a problem.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

PaulWilkinsUK said:


> Now that is an interesting idea! I guess you could you apple script to interact with TYSuiteJ or TivoTool (when it ever gets finished). I might have a play myself....


That functionality is built-in to TySuiteJ. It can either copy TY, convert to MPEG or even transcode to Quicktime automatically. I'm getting OK results from the Quicktime at the moment, but I'm struggling to get the video running smoothly.


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

TCM2007 said:


> That functionality is built-in to TySuiteJ. It can either copy TY, convert to MPEG or even transcode to Quicktime automatically. I'm getting OK results from the Quicktime at the moment, but I'm struggling to get the video running smoothly.


Good Lord! Is it really!! 
The results I'm getting from TYSuite seem ok, only I need to tweak the settings so that it downloads in 16:9, its just taking me a little time at the moment. Usually I take the output from TYSuite and then stuff the output through MPEG Streamclip to change the ratio.
Have I had time over Xmas to look at this, no I havent worst luck... 'er indoors bought the 'house' a PS3 for Xmas... shame!


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## Gunnyman (Jul 10, 2003)

there's a great howto for configuring tysuiteJ including how to build ffmpeg so it works again on ddb.
http://www.deal_database.com/forum/showpost.php?p=291689&postcount=552

remove the _ from the link. I followed the instructions and it worked perfectly.


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

40 mins for a full-length film sounds great! If it's realtime or less, I'm happy.

Good news about the scripts, too.

I'm a bit concerned with people saying the video sometimes isn't smooth though...if I'm spending the money on a bigger drive and cachecard etc., I'll want it to be capable of transferring full-quality to my Mac, with good quality stereo audio and picture, to then be put on a DVD or watched full-screen on the Mac.

When the video is being pulled off the Tivo, does Tivo have to be on (green light on)? Can it do this in the background while you're watching you Tivo as normal? And, what about when using TivoWeb, can Tivo just be in standy?

Thanks!


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

Gunnyman said:


> there's a great howto for configuring tysuiteJ including how to build ffmpeg so it works again on ddb.
> http://www.deal_database.com/forum/showpost.php?p=291689&postcount=552
> 
> remove the _ from the link. I followed the instructions and it worked perfectly.


Sweeet ! Thats todays little distraction taken care of ...


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## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

MarkW19 said:


> 40 mins for a full-length film sounds great! If it's realtime or less, I'm happy.


You can stream in realtime using ccxstream. I use it with a modded Xbox running XBMC. Mode 0 upscales very nicely to 720p.



MarkW19 said:


> I'm a bit concerned with people saying the video sometimes isn't smooth though...if I'm spending the money on a bigger drive and cachecard etc., I'll want it to be capable of transferring full-quality to my Mac, with good quality stereo audio and picture, to then be put on a DVD or watched full-screen on the Mac.


Because the video is being compressed, it's never going to look identical to the raw bitstream. But take it from me, Doctor Who watched on a 92inch screen still looks great!



> When the video is being pulled off the Tivo, does Tivo have to be on (green light on)? Can it do this in the background while you're watching you Tivo as normal? And, what about when using TivoWeb, can Tivo just be in standy?


As long as the TiVo is plugged in, you can extract video. TiVoweb etc may be a bit sluggish because the TiVo's processor isn't really designed to be doing so much at once.


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

The streaming sounds good, is this possible on the Mac?

As long as the video/audio quality is >80&#37; of the original, I'm not fussed! As long as there's no stuttering/lost frames, and it's all smooth...


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## gwailofilms (Jun 12, 2007)

Just a quick addition: Toast 8 lists among its features the ability to haul recorded TiVo programmes over a network and burn them to DVD.


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## Gunnyman (Jul 10, 2003)

PaulWilkinsUK said:


> Sweeet ! Thats todays little distraction taken care of ...


You're welcome
it really is a pity the developer of Tivotool gave up on the project. It was quite nice. TysuiteJ is good, but I'd rather have a true mac program rather than a java one.


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

Gunnyman said:


> You're welcome
> it really is a pity the developer of Tivotool gave up on the project. It was quite nice. TysuiteJ is good, but I'd rather have a true mac program rather than a java one.


Hi All,
Well I had a bash at the 'mods', still gave me a load of issues. Broken Pipe - which I've now deduced means, can't find _xyz_ in path _abc_. Oh and then a whole raft of stack traces... bleedin JAVA !!


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

I got everything sorted today, and TivoTool is working great!

Except, it doesn't store my prefs (auto-recording, paths to vserver etc.), which makes it impossible to set it to automatically download programmes.

Does anyone know how to make it save my prefs?

And, every recording has a thin green band at the right hand side, either when streamed, or when output to iTunes etc. How do I remove this?

Also, where do I get some *good* channel logos from (freeview)? And how do I load them on?


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

MarkW19 said:


> ...And, every recording has a thin green band at the right hand side, either when streamed, or when output to iTunes etc. How do I remove this?


Take a look at this thread http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=292847&highlight=tivotool. I asked the same question myself some time ago...


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

Cheers, I'll try and live with the green line, although it's annoying!

Also, when I output to iTunes (mp4/AAC) using tivotool, the picture/sync is perfect, but the audio "wobbles" about every 4 seconds. What can I do about this?


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

MarkW19 said:


> Cheers, I'll try and live with the green line, although it's annoying!
> 
> Also, when I output to iTunes (mp4/AAC) using tivotool, the picture/sync is perfect, but the audio "wobbles" about every 4 seconds. What can I do about this?


Hmmm interesting... never come across that one. I'll ask my good friend Speedyrite.

'Oi, Smiffy......'


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

I seem to have (maybe) found a workaround, just doing some further testing...I enabled Mode 0, and the green line seems to have gone!

The wobbling audio has been complained about before, with no definitive answer as far as I can remember! It's definitely only when converted to mp4/AAC for iTunes, DivX/MPEG2/streaming are absolutely fine.

Hmm...


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

Paul: Do you use tivotool, or tysuitej?


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

MarkW19 said:


> Paul: Do you use tivotool, or tysuitej?


Well I used to use TiVoTool 0.5.7 until Leopard came along. I tried 0.7.n and found it to be so flawed to be unusable. Now I use TySuiteJ, but I'm still discovering what makes it tick. TiVoTool was the best thing since slide bread in my opinion, its just a shame it all went pear shaped.


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## speedyrite (May 18, 2002)

MarkW19 said:


> Cheers, I'll try and live with the green line, although it's annoying!
> 
> Also, when I output to iTunes (mp4/AAC) using tivotool, the picture/sync is perfect, but the audio "wobbles" about every 4 seconds. What can I do about this?


Yes I've noticed this too, particularly when music is involved. I've previously tried various things but to no avail. My latest test involves output from TivoTool as .mpg (MPEG2) and then encoding to .mp4 using MPEG Streamclip. This required the purchase of the QuickTime MPEG-2 component from Apple for £15. I think this has done the trick but I'm still reviewing what I have converted.


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## speedyrite (May 18, 2002)

PaulWilkinsUK said:


> TiVoTool was the best thing since sliced bread in my opinion, its just a shame it all went pear shaped.


Indeed! The version for Leopard (0.7.0) is not quite right, but 0.5.7 is excellent on Tiger.


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

Yes, thats a valid point... I only download in MPEG2 format and then convert from there on. Hence I guess why I've never had a case of 'the wobbles'.


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## MarkW19 (Oct 25, 2002)

I've just been trying to sort my channel logos out, as I have none at the moment! I've been doing it through Tivoweb, imported all the logos from Aerialplug, assigned them to the correct channels and they all show up, rebooted (twice now), but Tivo still shows nothing, either in Now Playing or on the channel banner.

Can anyone help?


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## PaulWilkinsUK (Mar 20, 2006)

MarkW19 said:


> I've just been trying to sort my channel logos out, as I have none at the moment! I've been doing it through Tivoweb, imported all the logos from Aerialplug, assigned them to the correct channels and they all show up, rebooted (twice now), but Tivo still shows nothing, either in Now Playing or on the channel banner.
> 
> Can anyone help?


Hmmm... I would perhaps suggest putting up a new thread, I've not got muh experience of logos 'n' things


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