pyTivo Discussion Forum

JonMikelV · Joined: 22 Feb 2008 Posts: 40

OK - this one's a bit of a stretch, both for pyTiVo and the spirit of the TiVo service so feel free to ignore or delete this.

Currently NPL folder names are limited to items showing up in the guide data. This means either no folders, folders works great (until the show falls off the guide), or everything falls under something that's always on like Paid Programming.

I was toying with the possibility of adding our own programs to the guide via:
1) pyTiVo intercepts my TiVo's guide request (through a little DNS or static route fiddling)
2) pyTiVo passes on the request to TiVo & gets back the response (basically, the guide data)
3) pyTiVo adds on 'fake' programs that support the folder names found in metadata files on current shares
4) pyTiVo feeds the enhanced guide data back to my TiVo

I know, it's a bit - um - aggressive, but I'm curious what people think about it both on a technical as well as TiVo service level.

Thanks.

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 444

Both impractical, and unnecessary. You can get custom folder names via the "push" mechanism, which has already been added to pyTivo (though it needs a little polish yet).

I'd love to intercept the guide data, for other reasons (i.e., to correct it), but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

philhu · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 121

Well, the guide data comes down as a gzipped SLICE. A complete data file for all data for your location, gzipped.

The Tivo WILL do multiple slices. I wrote programs to create slices and load them on my Tivo for channels Tivo doesnt support, a few years ago.
It even sent email to the tivo with daily status from 'Phil's Excellent Guide Service' Smile

The way you'd do it is to let tivo load the normal slices, data just like it does now

On a recurring schedule build your new slices, send them to the tivo.

Then have the tivo look in a directory and if it sees slices, process them.

To start this project, you will need to build a custom addchannel slice, to add the channels and pointers to the tivo tables before you do any of the other work, which means you need to hack a telnet prompt on your tivo, which is yet another story. See dealdatabase.com for tivo forums on doing things like this.

philhu · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 121

JonMikelV · Joined: 22 Feb 2008 Posts: 40

Wow philhu, sounds like you've already done a lot of stuff necessary for this sort of a thing.

The biggest thing I would be worried about with implementing something like this is how easy it could be for somebody to corrupt it into a TiVo guide replacement so they wouldn't have to pay for the monthly guide data. I know such things already exist, but I wouldn't want pyTiVo to become associated with that.

But I'm not tied to this process at all - it was more of a conceptual game for me (remember, I'm lazy - I don't usually get past concept) and since it sounds like there's a better solution in the push stuff I think I'll focus on understanding that for now.

I was out of the country for 3 weeks so I'm kinda behind on my reading. Smile

Jon-Mikel

philhu · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 121

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 444

There is no end-user mechanism yet to choose the name, AFAIK, apart from choosing the title of the first program transferred. If you want to know the details of how it works, you'll have to study the code, and experiment. I haven't really done so myself, yet -- the push feature is all armooo's work, and I don't think anyone else is up to speed on it yet. Certainly I'm not.

philhu · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 121

Anyone play more with custom folders for Tivo? Or figured them out better?

wgw · Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 226

Don't know about anyone else, but I stopped playing with the push feature because I could not start playing the video until the entire transfer was complete.

wmcbrine · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 444

I just now played a couple pushed videos while they were transferring. This was with the webvideo plugin.

Edit: ...and for good measure, one with the transfer initiated from the browser interface. I see what you mean, though -- I had to transfer a fairly long clip to get it to work, and it got two-thirds of the way through before it would let me play it.

I doubt there's anything we can do about it, except to reserve this feature for unattended transfers. Then again, the delay didn't seem as long with the webvideo plugin, so maybe there is something...