My PVR Blogs
Monday, April 26, 2004
Useful DirecTiVo files
- endpad Allows your TIVO to gracefully "pad" recordings only if it won't cause you to miss other shows. I record a lot of shows back to back, and with 2 tuners, it works pretty well, but if there are two seperate channels that I'm recording shows on back to back, it will skip recording interleaved shows if I try to pad. This TSR gracefully adds padding if nothing else is going on.
- TivoWeb Plus Gives you great web based access to your tivo (including a virtual remote to control everything with).
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Filling up drives
Well, I now have a 160GB DirecTivo drive almost full (OK, it is only recognizing 124GB of the drive), a 200GB drive on my main system COMPLETELY full, and a 160GB drive on my HTPC almost full of movies. Star Trek, ST:TNG, Friends, Seinfeld, Band of Brothers. Man, this stuff really starts adding up. I don't think I can even begin to burn these to DVD and help make space. Band of Brothers (10 episodes) is going to run me around 12GB alone (and that is pretty tight compression coming straight from DTV in MPEG2 format). I'm not happy with how poor the compression looks when played back with a player. Not sure how/why it is different (probably because I'm stretching and blowing up the leterbox version in a 4:3 display to fully fit my 16:9 widescreen TV). Anyway, I can't wait for DivX/MPEG4 and 1080i HDTV digital broadcasts to take hold (hopefully there will be a way to record those broadcasts and get them off the recorder). But, boy, if I thought I had disk space and network bandwidth problems now...that is going to be a REAL increase.
I'm still trying to figure out the best way to re-encode the DTV MPEG2 broadcast. Right now, the TY (proprietary Tivo encoded MPEG2 bastardized format) has errors when multiplexed into MPEG2 (not really a re-encode, just a header fix/change done by TYTOOLS). VirtualDub-MPEG2 and TMPGEnc has audio sync problems, Windows Media Player gets frozen/stuck on video frames (but the audio keeps playing), and SnapStream BTV player also has glitches. Seems like it plays fine on a DVD player when you mux it to VOB and burn it with TYTOOLS and PowerDVD and WinDVD both play it back just fine (as MPEG2) as well.
Anyway, I really don't like how the comercial edit/cuts are done in TYTOOLS, and wish I could stream copy it into VirutalDub (love the edit/cut functions in there). I also wish I had a DVD player that supported native MPEG4/DivX. What am I talking about? I do...my HTPC. Hum...
