pyTivo Discussion Forum

codemonkey76 · Joined: 05 Sep 2008 Posts: 7

So my pytivo + TiVoHD setup has been a godsend for my kids DVD's (especially baby Einstein). No more scratches! Anyway, I seem to be randomly getting a problem and hope the experts here can help:

My current method is to rip the main feature VOB's (via DVDfab), then join them together using either vob2mpg or just cat-ing them together (if you're familiar with linux) and naming the destination file whatever.mpg. Most of the time, this mpg transfers and plays no problem. Once in a while however, I'll start transferring and notice TiVo thinks the movie is 12 minutes long, or 63 minutes long, or some other incorrect length. And THEN before it even transfers that amount, it will just bail out and pytivo gets a "remote connection closed by peer" or some such error.

After some searching, I discovered there can be "timecode" breaks in some mpgs. So I download MPEG_StreamClip and fix the timecode breaks. Now TiVo sees the movie as being the correct length, but it still craps out before transferring the whole file, and it always fails at the same point in the file (e.g. at the 6 minute mark - whether it's been "fixed" or not).

My questions are:
1) what is the "right" way to create the mpg from DVD, without transcoding?
2) is there any way to get pytivo/tivo to transfer my current files without transcoding them (so I avoid re-ripping)?
3) why does this happen on some files, but not others?
4) just what the hell is going on anyway!?

Thanks guys! Hope you can offer some insight! I'm stumped!

wgw · Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 262

Some of the older versions of pytivo have problems with early termination which were fixed in recent versions. I believe the Windows installer version may also be defective. You should be using a version from the wmcbrine or wgw branch dated late august or september. You can also search this forum for "override" for options to make sure pytivo uses the correct duration. DVDFab is able to extract the vob's to one large vob using vob passthrough. Your problem might be that you are splitting the file with DVDFab and then rejoining with some other app.

codemonkey76 · Joined: 05 Sep 2008 Posts: 7

Thanks for the advice. I managed to find how to do VOB passthrough (http://club.cdfreaks.com/f116/how-do-you-use-vob-passthrough-229169/#post1900403) and will try that next chance I get.
It still sounds like there are similar problems even with this method though (if you read the thread), so I guess some experimenting is in order... Wink

noseph · Joined: 18 Jun 2008 Posts: 2 Location: MA

I have had very good success using DVDFab 5 DVD to Mobile option 'VOB' to rip the 'Main Feature' and then process the VOB thru VideoRedo's Quickstream Fix to get an MPG that requires no transcoding. Neither of these programs are free, but they are worth their cost.

I was using DVD Shrink 3.2 but was running into too many DVDs that it could not handle, development stopped on this product several years ago. I also ran into too may VOBs that Media Streamclip did not handle properly. I have not had any pyTiVo to TiVo Series 3 transfer failures using the combination of DVDFab 5 and VideoRedo.

windracer · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 160 Location: St. Pete, FL

I use VideoReDo TVSuite. It's not free, but it's a great MPEG editor and allows for easy joining of VOBs into a single file.

sdmoore68 · Joined: 05 Oct 2008 Posts: 1 Location: Florida

I use DVDShrink (free) to merge the VOBs into a single file and then rename it to .mpg, drop it into your TiVo Recordings folder and you are done.

http://www.adverserealms.com/tivo/tivo.html shows a step by step process.

johnnyjet · Joined: 01 Jul 2008 Posts: 6

CodeMonkey:
If you're on linux, then mencoder is your friend!!!!
The initial issue that you are seeing is that the index is out of phase with the actual audio/video in the file. You should be able to fix it with something like 'mencoder whatever.mpg -ovc copy -oac copy -forceidx -o test.mpg'.
As far as the whole ripping thing, perl::dvdrip, and vlc do ripping and decryption of CSS for you, the advantage to perl::dvdrip being that it does a pretty good job of cropping/resizing/transcoding in a few fairly painless steps. VLC does a pretty good job of just grabbing the disc contents and making a file, which you could then just use mencoder to transcode from those huge mp2v .mpg files down to itty bitty Mpeg4 or h264 files, and take up a lot less space on the HD.
I also have handbrake on my linux boxes, but I haven't figured out their cli.

jj