WMA Support for TiVo Desktop - Beta1

[pzand]

Hey all,

I have written a plugin for TiVo Desktop that allows the publishing of WMA files to your TiVo. Figured I'd share :)

If you have the HMO, a few (or a lot of) WMA files and are brave enough to run beta software, please try this out and post know your results.

To install:

Step 1: Make sure that TiVo Desktop is not running. Verify that you don't have a little TiVo icon in your task bar.

Step 2: Download the Windows Media Runtime from here (http://users.planetcable.net/pzand/wmfdist.asp) and install it. Even though you have the latest version of the Windows Media Player installed and can play WMA files fine, you will probably still need this. Don't ask... this is not my file, it's Microsoft's. I've merely copied it to provide you with a convenient link.

Step 3: Download the installer for the plugin from here (http://users.planetcable.net/pzand/wmaplugin.asp). Unzip it into a temporary folder somewhere and run setup.exe. Make sure that, when asked for where you want to install this, you point it to the folder where you installed TiVo Desktop. It doesn't matter if you install for yourself or for everyone.

Startup TiVo Desktop, and publish your WMA files. Run to your TiVo and see if it works!

Please note: I have tested this on XP and Windows 2000, against a variety of WMA files, but there may very well be things that I didn't expect or dependencies that will cause this not to work. As a matter of fact, I will be very surprised if this works for everyone.

Finally: This is beta software. It has bugs. It may not even work at all for you. It may cause things to happen that you didn't even think were possible. By installing this, you assume full responsibility.

ENJOY!

Peter

[skippybosco]

Since the Tivo does not support decoding a WMA file, does this plug in convert the WMA to MPEG on the fly? If this is the case, what kinds of speeds are you seeing for conversion?

This is awesome!! I've been looking for just this thing (getting AVI's or Divx would be a nice thing as well along with being able to pull programs from the Tivo down to the PC (maybe even converting to WMA or AVI (Divx?) to save space...

[pzand]

Yup, that's exactly what it does.
Speed wise, it doesn't really matter as long as it's faster than real time. TiVo will begin playing before the conversion is done.

I take it it works for you, then?

[skippybosco]

not yet, I haven't gotten HMO... you picked a great time to come out with this with the upcoming 30 day free trial about to happen.. I'll give this a shot on August 4 when it starts..

Since you pretty much have the hard work done, have you thought about adding support for Divx or AVI?

[pzand]

At this point, the software that runs in the TiVo allows for MP3 audio and JPEG pictures only. No video.

So no Divx or Avi...

[Turtleboy]

I just installed this and it works great!!

Great job!!

:up: :up: :up:

[pzand]

That's great news!

[Turtleboy]

So where's the .shn support? (just kidding).

[TiVoBill]

I tried it out on a Windows XP Professional box and it works great!

[pzand]

Bill, thanks for trying this out and posting back! Glad it works for you. No issues at all?

Turtleboy: shn... hehehe... yeah :)

[VinceA]

I started using it last night on my WinXP Pro system and it's working great. Pretty soon I'll get rid of my parallel MP3 directory structure which I created since HMO didn't support WMAs.

[Turtleboy]

Now, while I was joking about .shn, I do have a question. And let me preface it by saying that I know absolutely nothing about programming, and what's easy and what's difficult, and how any of these things work.

Is it possible to enable it to play .shn files? Is it more difficult than WMA?

[pzand]

Vince: A whole parallel library, just for HMO???? Just out of curiosity, what package did you use to convert it all?

TB: WMA was actually relatively easy, since Microsoft provides you with all the tools you need to handle WMA files. Having never heard of .shn, I looked around a little bit a found only bits and pieces, with no real library to interact with these files.

In any case, it would be a whole new plugin. Can't just flip the switch and have it play .shn :)

But... if anybody wants to take a stab at it and use my code as a base, please shoot me a PM.

[VinceA]

I did a mass one time conversion with the Plus! Audio Converter:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/plus/dme/Music.asp

I also bought an MP3 option pack from someone (forget which one at the moment) for $10 so I could encode them from WMA to MP3. I prefer to use WMAs since they're smaller which is a priority when you're using a digital music player in your pocket (64MB goes a lot further with WMAs than MP3s) but HMO demanded the use MP3. I used the James River program for a 30 day trial but didn't buy it for some reason (which I forget now also). So, your addin fit the bill well (free is nice :))

[TiVoBill]

Originally posted by pzand
Bill, thanks for trying this out and posting back! Glad it works for you. No issues at all?


Well I only tried it on a few albums (I don't have a lot of music in WMA format) but it seemed to work great. The only issue that I ran into was I forgot to stop TiVo Server before I installed it (I know.. it was Step 1 in the instructions :)) and so when I selected my WMA files, they didn't show up on the DVR. Once I read the instructions, everything worked great. Is there any way for the installer to check to see if TiVo Server is running and put up a warning or something?

[pzand]

Yeah, the installer probably could/should figure that out.
Since the plugin itself is only 150kB or so, I was horrified to see that the installer was almost 4MB when Visual Studio was done building it! I didn't want to add any more overhead...

Perhaps I need to make a whole new installer instead of using Windows Setup :)

[samkuhn]

Any chance you could rig up a FLAC converter?
Here are the links to the developer info:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html
http://flac.sourceforge.net/developers.html

It would be great to have the lossless formats supported in simple fashion for HMO.

[Dargon]

pzand, did you use DirectShow to to the conversion to MP3?

I've written some code that queries Windows for all the formats for which it has codecs, and the associated file extensions. I wrote it for handling images, but querying for audio formats is very similar. If you do use DirectShow, we could combine our code and have our Tivo's playing any audio format that Windows Media Player understands. I just did a quick check using graphedt, and we would even be able to pull the audio out of video files (AVI, MPG, etc.).

I was thinking about doing that on my own anyway, but I don't see any reason to reinvent what you've done.

Have you looked at serving images at all? I'm already good at converting image formats known to Windows (and one that isn't) to JPG.

[pzand]

Dragon,

I started going down the directshow route because I like the way it'll pretty much decompress anything into raw PCM, which you can easilly make into mp3. However, after messing around with finding a reliable way to get the data (used the sample grabber, wrote my own sink filter, etc) I gave up on that thought. Besides, you'll need to tell the TiVoDesktop which formats you're supporting BEFORE you know which ones the graphbuilder will render correctly :)

Anyway... I ended up just using the media format SDK. It's pretty easy to instantiate a WMSyncReader to read the WMA, pick an output that supports a decent uncompressed format, and feed it into lame to make MP3.

Note that the conversion happens on the fly, so that Tivo will start playing the file while it's still converting. You can't just convert the whole file and THEN feed it to Tivo (although that would be REAL easy with a DShow graph).

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Interesting. I took a look at the SDK -- it would be trivial to write media converter plug-ins to convert all the still image and audio file formats that QuickTime supports (and there's a ton of them) into something the TiVo could use, but only on Windows. Go figure.

Anyone heard any rumblings about supporting the SDK (or at least providing its features) on the Mac?

[Ledgehead]

This plugin did not work on my Tivo. That's odd, because it seems to be working for several others. When I navigate the published folder structure to a folder that I know contains WMA files, the Tivo seems to pause for about 10 seconds or so and then gives me the following error:... Oh Damn. When I went back to repro the error for this posting, it worked for me.

[pzand]

Hehehe... it's that always the case? :)

It sounds like you had either the TiVoDesktop or the TiVoServer running while you did the install. Both have to be restarted for the plugin to get loaded. Hope it's stable now!

[VinceA]

I've had some odd results in my testing. My TiVo will show the first screen full of folders from a published directory (it's a share from a SNAP server in my bedroom) but when I arrow down past there I get a whole lot of blank lines (which seem to represent the other directories). Real odd stuff...

[Ledgehead]

I have also noticed the blank lines when scrolling through my music archives. But it's not just on folder...I have also seen it when I'm scrolling through many songs in one folder. If I pause and wait a few seconds then the names of the folders/songs are filled in. But this did not happen before installing the plugin. It's a small nuisance but worth the benefit of playing WMA's. I just don't see how the plugin can affect this. It should only affect the audio stream performance.

Regards,
Eric

[pzand]

Would either of you be able uninstall the plugin and see if you can reproduce this behavior? I've seen the same thing happen on the program guide where TiVo just seems slow to pull things up.

However, there is a chance that the plugin is asked to provide a title for a song where that song doesn't have "title" tag. That may result in a blank entry. The plugin is not involved, however, in providing the names of folders...

Unrelated: Have any of you seen any weirdness at the *end* of a song?

Peter

[Ledgehead]

I have stopped the Tivo Desktop Publisher, uninstalled the WMA plugin and restarted the publisher. I then repro'd the problem on folders only. So it appears that although I haven't seen this before....it's a performance problem with the Tivo Desktop Publisher, not the plugin.

While doing this repro, I even had a couple of timeout errors. There seems to be an intermittent problem with latency between the Tivo and the Publisher.

Now that I know it's not the Plugin, I'll reinstall it....gotta have my WMA's.

I'm employed by Microsoft....it's an employee loyalty thing and a disk space thing!

:)

Cheers,
Eric

[pzand]

Eric,

Thank you for figuring this out. Makes me happy that this also happens without my plugin loaded.... well... sort of... you know what I mean :)

Peter

[pzand]

If TiVoBill is still listening in...

I can't seem to find any contact information in the Desktop Plug-in SDK and I believe I have found an omission that is sorely needed by some plugins.

Who do I talk to?

Thanks,

Peter

[Parkmad]

I tried it but I get an error. The music can be published to the server and I can see all the songs through the Tivo. However, when I push play, that's when I get an error about a problem with the server.
Should I try to reinstall?
I will also try some different files. I was trying songs that I downloaded off of buymusic.com (so far not a worthwhile experience) and maybe the security on the songs is affecting my ability to play on Tivo.

[pzand]

Parkmad,

Sorry to hear that... I think you're on the right track, though. I never even thought about it, but I don't think the plugin works on files with DRM. I gotta try that :)

Thanks!

Peter

[Parkmad]

Well, it's not that, at least not yet. I cannot play other WMA files either. How do I unistall the plug-in? I would like to try again.

[pzand]

It's in the control panel, under "Add/Remove Programs".

[motardo]

This is a very nice hack, granted I don't have any WMA files, but if you are making an installer, go for the Nullsoft Installer System (http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nsis/), it'll provide you with a REAL small footprint for the installer, making the install probably about 200K

[pzand]

The installer is a drag and drop toy in Visual Studio that I hadn't used before. Of course, it was quick to remind me of my dislike for drag and drop development; it's large, has gobs of code that you don't need, you have very limited control over what happens and NO control over HOW it happens. Looks like the Nullsoft guys figured out how to do it right. I have some investigating to do :)

Thanks motardo!

[yenne]

Got HMO working late last night, installed your WMA plug-in, and everything worked first time on my Series2.

I can't thank you enough for putting your time into writing this plug-in! I had resigned myself to blowing $40 on a different media server, not to mention the time needed to learn how to use it.

I've written a good bit of free software in my time, so I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Might I offer you some free website hosting in return for your graciousness? I have a couple of personal servers at RackShack with more than enough room.

Let me know, and thanks again!

-britt (tivo@yenne.net)

[Patrickcg]

Thank you so much kind sir. You have saved me many hours of changing my WMAs to MP3. I got the free trial today and installed your plug in and it works fine. It threw me off a moment, since it has a bit of a delay before it starts playing, but it worked!

Thanks again.

[jimpfnj]

Originally posted by Parkmad
I tried it but I get an error. The music can be published to the server and I can see all the songs through the Tivo. However, when I push play, that's when I get an error about a problem with the server.


I have the same problem. Interesting, it worked on the first couple of songs I played, but then started getting this message. I have a lot of WMAs (from 400+ CDs). Maybe if I publish a smaller set.

jim

[yenne]

My wife encountered that error message about the server. I stopped and restarted the Tivo server on the PC and the problem was resolved. Something got wedged, and it's not clear whether it's the Tivo server or the WMA plug-in.

We're happily listening to WMAs again.

-britt

[pzand]

Jim,
I've seen the same thing happen, and I believe it's caused by a requirement of the Tivo Server. Somehow, Tivo Server wants to know in advance how big the MP3 is going to be, and the plugin can't do anything but guess since it hasn't done the conversion from WMA to MP3 yet at that point. It seems that if the guess is too far off, you get this error and it (Tivo Server) won't recover without stopping and restarting. I can't reproduce it on any specific file, though.... Can you?

Yenne and Patrickcg: thank's for your kind words. I've taken so much from these forums, it's nice to contribute for once.

Peter

[TiVo'dInSeattle]

Peter,

Thanks SO much for the WMA plug-in. It works wonderfully.

However, I have noticed that not all the controls work with my WMA files. Specifically, while I can navigate between songs with Chan Up/Dn just like with my MP3s, I cannot navigate within a song using the FF/RW buttons like I can with my MP3s. Is this due to on-the-fly conversion?

[pzand]

TIS,

Huh?? That works without any problems on my TiVo.

Perhaps something isn't quite keeping up on your PC? Open up task manager or performance monitor or something on your PC that displays CPU usage. Start playing a song on your TiVo. You should see CPU usage jump up and stay up for a couple of seconds. As soon as CPU usage falls back down, the song is converted and sent to TiVo (assuming that your PC can convert faster than TiVo can play it, which is the case on every PC I've seen).

Can you FF/REW from this point on?

Peter

[yenne]

I've seen the same thing happen, and I believe it's caused by a requirement of the Tivo Server.
Another possibility: I generally see the problem happen when I cancel a currently playing song in the first few seconds, then try to play another song (or just start another song within a few seconds of starting a different one). Perhaps a communication breakdown if the plug-in is still converting a song while the Tivo server cancels or requests another?

-britt

[jimpfnj]

Originally posted by yenne
Another possibility: I generally see the problem happen when I cancel a currently playing song in the first few seconds, then try to play another song (or just start another song within a few seconds of starting a different one). Perhaps a communication breakdown if the plug-in is still converting a song while the Tivo server cancels or requests another?

-britt

That sounds like what's happening to me. Seems to work fine when playing music normally, but playing around and demoing it where I'm jumping from song to song it gives me the server error and I need to restart the server software.

[Parkmad]

I now am able to play WMA's as long as I do not have any DRM songs in the list. If the tivo tries to play one of those songs, I then get the server error even for non-DRM songs. Since I only have 1 album of DRM songs (from an experiment with buymusic), I will remove it from my published music.

Thanks for the great plug-in. :)

[pzand]

It sounds like once you make the server mad it's mad, huh?
I have seen the same thing with the server error when jumping between songs and I think I have it tracked down to an error in the plugin that I will fix.

Parkmad: Thanks for the research on DRM... Not sure if I'll be able to fix that, but will try!

Thanks,

Peter

[Dargon]

Originally posted by pzand
However, after messing around with finding a reliable way to get the data (used the sample grabber, wrote my own sink filter, etc) I gave up on that thought. Besides, you'll need to tell the TiVoDesktop which formats you're supporting BEFORE you know which ones the graphbuilder will render correctly :)
That's the same method I had in mind. When do you need to tell TivoDesktop which formats you support? Is it a function call or a global the TivoDesktop reads? I don't have any experience with audio, but I can query the image file formats (and extensions) that can be rendered.

Originally posted by pzand
Anyway... I ended up just using the media format SDK.
Do you think the problems you ran in to were ones that couldn't be solved, or did you just use the more direct route to solving your problem? I'm trying to get a feel for whether it is a waste of time to try developing a DShow one myself :-).

Originally posted by pzand
Note that the conversion happens on the fly, so that Tivo will start playing the file while it's still converting. You can't just convert the whole file and THEN feed it to Tivo (although that would be REAL easy with a DShow graph).

My understanding is that this is what would happen with a DShow sink filter. Of course my first step would be to convert a file completely and ship it out, like you describe above.

Thanks for the insight into you experience!

[pzand]

Dargon,

I'm assuming you downloaded the SDK. TiVoDesktop asks for a number of "interfaces". If you indicate that you want to be a "media converter" then it'll ask you what you can convert to what. It'll also depend on info from the plugin for song title, genre, and all other tags. (note that that's HARD from a DirectShow Graph!!)

The whole thing is based on mime types, so 1) it'll examine the mime type of a file and then 2) it'll give it to the plugin that said it supported that mime type. It's a neat concept, but it reportedly breaks as soon as two plugins support the same type! Anyway, the short answer to your question: On startup.

I went the MFSDK route because it was a couple orders of magnitude easier. Especially since all I was going for was WMA. The DShow way is certainly do-able, but I ran into too many issues that I didn't want to solve at the time. (There are still quite a few things in DShow that don't QUITE behave as documented)

Peter

[morac]

This works great, but uses an extreme amount of memory. Normally the server uses around 30 megs of memory when serving. When playing a 2 meg .wma file it was using 125 megs of memory.

Does it decode the file and store it in memory?

[pzand]

Yowzers! No, unless the TiVoServer is doing something I'm not aware of?
My TiVoServer process is sitting solid at 3.5MB.... Not sure how you're getting to even 30!

[afinegold]

pzand,

Absolutely perfect!!!

No, that doesn't describe Seattle's weather this summer (well, actually it does!) but the way your wonderful creation worked for me when I tried it this evening. I'm using a Series 2 standalone with Windows 98SE, and "out of the box," so to speak, everything worked perfectly. I followed your instructions to turn off the tray icon, downloaded and installed both items, rebooted the computer to make sure everything still came up okay, copied a few .wma's to one of my TiVo Publisher folders thru Windows Explorer, and ran into the living room to see what would happen. Perfection!! Everything worked absolutely flawlessly. The .wma songs I copied were already in the folder as .mp3's, so I was able to compare them one right after the other using the TiVo. They sounded identical, the ONLY difference being that while the .mp3's started playing immediately after the green scroll bar showed up, the .wma's took 3-4 seconds or so to start, during which I assume the conversion is occuring. After that everything was identical, including the ability to use the fast forward and rewind feature.

A bonus that I didn't realize would occur is that the .wma files now show up in the TiVo Publisher window when you click on a .wma folder, and double-clicking brings up the window that shows the properties and allows you to play the song. Everything works just like .mp3's. Amazing.

Great job, well done, and you have my everlasting appreciation. I had downloaded one of those .wma to .mp3 converter programs last night but found I couldn't convert more than 5 at a time with the trial version and it took several minutes and a lot clicking, dragging and dropping, etc. to do the 5. I was not looking forward to converting dozens or hundreds of files, and now thanks to you I have to convert none. So thanks much again.

Oh, and about that Seattle weather comment, please everyone forget it. The summer has really been crappy, only between 75 and 85 most days with no humidity and no rain, so you don't even want to think about coming to visit, and especially not about moving here!!

Al Finegold

[morac]

Originally posted by pzand
Yowzers! No, unless the TiVoServer is doing something I'm not aware of?
My TiVoServer process is sitting solid at 3.5MB.... Not sure how you're getting to even 30! Hmm, just loading TiVoServer.exe up and having it sit idle with nothing shared uses 10MB. TiVoBeacon.exe uses around 2.5 MB.


I decided to test it again and this time set performace to "Low" (was on "Medium High"). This is on Windows XP Pro SP1 with Windows Media Player 9 installed:

1. Played a .mp3 TivoServer.exe jumped to 15 MB.
2. Playing a 2nd .mp3 it jumped to 24 MB.
3. Played the original .mp3 from #1 and memory stayed at 24MB even when FFing.
4. The moment the.wma file started playing it jumped to 134 MB and around 95% CPU. The CPU dropped to 0% in about 10 seconds, but the memory didn't. About 15 seconds before the song ended the memory usage dropped back down to 20 MB.
5. When the next .mp3 started playing it went back to 25MB.
6. I then paused the song and exited to the folder list and it stayed at 25 MB.
7. Tried a different .wma file and it went back to 134 MB until the song was nearly done and then dropped to 18.5 MB.
8. A 3rd .wma song played right after this and memory usage went up to 128 MB, then near the end dropped to 11.2 MB

I typed the above and then noticed the following:

I figured out that TivoServer will use as much memory as it needs to get the job done as fast a possible, but it is restricted by the performance setting and it will not use more memory than is currently physically available. I believe the performance setting tells it how much memory other programs are allowed to steal from it.

On "Medium" I opened up tons of programs and tried the .wma file. It only used about 60 megs and then dropped down to 6 MB.
On "Medium High" I left opened all the programs and tried another .wma file. It only used about 95 megs (swapping some other programs to the system cache) and then dropped down to 8 MB.

So the more memory in your machine, the more TiVoServer will use. It just so happens .wma convertions needs more memory than normal. I have 256 MB of memory.


edit: 10/24 for spelling mistakes.

[pzand]

Interesting finds... and good debugging!

I'll have to do a little searching myself, but I'm not sure I have any control over how much memory is used. Internally, I'm using Microsoft's WMA reader which (considering MS's track record) is probably not the most conservative with memory. I take the raw PCM that the reader outputs and feed to it lame to make MP3. That then gets fed to TiVoServer or TiVoDesktop (whomever happens to be hosting the converter at the time).

Are you playing this from the Tivo Desktop? Or through tivo itself and TiVo Server? TivoServer probably keeps my output in memory until it's done streaming it to TiVo. But it should also do that for files that are naturally in MP3 format, so I'm curious where the difference comes from.

Anyway... it doesn't sound like a leak; more like a hog :)

I will let you know if I find anything...

Peter

[morac]

That was all playing through the TiVo HMO.

I just tried playing it through the TiVo Desktop and it didn't use more than 16 MB total when playing a .wma, it also didn't seem to use much of the CPU and it started playing immediately. My guess is it doesn't do the conversion when played inside the TiVo Desktop.

BTW this has nothing to do with the plugin, but I noticed that if I right click on a song in TiVo Desktop, the "play" option is grayed out, but if I choose properties and click the little play icon it starts playing. I thought this was strange.

I don't think its a leak either, but just the way TiVo Server was designed. It apparently doesn't need to use that much memory (as shown in my tests), but decideds to anyway. If I leave performance on "low" or "medium" it shouldn't cause problems with me running other programs. Normally I don't use both the TiVo and my computer at the same time though so it shouldn't cause to many problems. BTW my computer is only a P3 600, but I don't think that should affect memory usage (only conversion speed).

A question, what bitrate do you reencode the wma files at when converting to mp3? Maybe that has something to do with it?

Or maybe like you said, the MS WMA reader just is a hog. :)

[pzand]

My guess is it doesn't do the conversion when played inside the TiVo Desktop.
Actually, it does. TiVoDesktop and TiVoServer behave the same towards plugins. Apparently, the internals are quite different.

A question, what bitrate do you reencode the wma files at when converting to mp3?
I ask the WMA reader for 44.1kHz, 16 bit, stereo (regardless of what the original was encoded at). Those samples get fed to lame, which uses its defaults for a quality setting of 5. (which, I'm guessing, is 128k cbr) I played with various compression settings but couldn't hear the difference when played through TiVo. This seemed like a decent trade off.

[WoodyL]

This is a great addition to HMO! I hope more people will write plug-ins like this. Is there a way to play streaming Windows Media URLs using this or any other plug-in? There are some Internet radio stations I'd like to listen to.

[mnw2000]

I installed it according to the instructions and it did not work.

My PC is Windows 2000.
My Tivo is 80GB version with HMO.

The error is that it lists the WMA music files, but when I try to play them it simply runs through them with "continuous music" underneath it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Marc

[pzand]

Marc,

Do normal MP3s work right? If so, the only thing I can advise you to do is to uninstall the plugin, reinstall the Microsoft thing and then reinstall the plugin. Make sure that the tivo server and tivo publisher processes are not running while you do this (check with Task Manager's process list).

I'm also running this on 2000, so your OS shouldn't be an issue.

Peter

[mnw2000]

Yes. MP3s work great. I have tried this, but I will try the process again.

Thanks.

Marc

[WoodyL]

Bump!

Originally posted by WoodyL
This is a great addition to HMO! I hope more people will write plug-ins like this. Is there a way to play streaming Windows Media URLs using this or any other plug-in? There are some Internet radio stations I'd like to listen to.

[pzand]

Woody: Not that I know. I have a few stations I'd like to listen to myself. Supposedly, it works with shoutcast. Perhaps there's something that can translate from stream WMA to shoutcast on the fly??

[cheitzig]

pzand: Nice software. Seems to work really well. Thanks. I'm a new (week old) TiVo owner.

I have a feature suggestion for you though: do you (or TiVo themselves) have any plans to support .wpl playlists? It seems like one of the core reasons people would have to use the plug-in you wrote would be to continue to be able to use Windows Media Player as their media player. Not being able to read .wpl's though creates a challenge in keeping with WMP. Granted, I could export the .wpl's to asx format (or whatever format HMO support), but it'd be really nice to keep everything consistent.

[Takadamu]

pzand, thanks for posting this. I didn't want to have to convert my entire collection to MP3s.

I get frequent cases of the server crashing, though, requiring a restart. From your description, it sounds like this is a problem with making an estimate on track length before the track is converted?

Is the length available in the WMA tag information? Or less elegantly, could a different utility precompute the converted length for each WMA file in a directory tree and store the info in a table?

Are you sharing your source code along with your filter?

Again, thanks for the software!

[icatar]

Pzand,

Tivo should get on their hands and knees and thank you! I'm sure they'll get many sales on HMO now that it has WMA capabilities! It has made my purchase of HMO extremely worthwhile now!

Thanks!

BTW, cheitzig, you can export the WMA playlists to M3U format and HMO can read them fine!

[Jem]

I have just written a plug-in for the TiVo Desktop that recognizes .wpl playlists and allows navigation using the Windows Media Player library.

This is the first version and so there may be bugs, but I would be interested to know how well it works with Pzand's wma plug-in.

My plug-in doesn't do any format conversion. It just provides different navigation methods, so it's completely separate from the wma plug-in.

See my recent thread in this forum entitled "Windows Media Player plug-in for TiVo Desktop" for more. (I can't post links yet due to anti-spamming trap.)

[markku]

Thanks for a great plug-in pzand!

Were you ever abe to find a way to get the great plug-in to work with DRM?

I seem to have the same behavior that parkmad described earlier, i.e. files with DRM show 'continuous ' length, and don't play. After trying to play files with DRM, the non-DRM files also give a server error message. Exiting and re-starting the server gets the non-DRM files working ok again.

BR|
Markku

[mdunker]

pzand,

I can get a small .wma file to work. What I'm really interested in is getting a large recording of a 3 hour radio program to work (~ 20 meg). This never works for me. Is there any theoretical reason it shouldn't?

Thanks for a great plug-in.

[morac]

mdunker,

The plugin works by converting the .wma file to a .mp3 file on the fly. The 20 meg file is probably too large to convert fast enough before the TiVo's request times out (around 30 seconds).

You're better off either converting that wma file to a mp3 file or splitting it up into smaller files.

[Takadamu]

Speaking of which, does anyone know of a good utility for converting WMAs to MP3s? Something that can be pointed at a directory tree and change all the files...

[WoodyL]

dBpowerAMP does various kinds of conversions. It might do what you want.

[futerfas]

Works like a charm, now I can listen to that "Like Humans Do" song on my tivo that came with Windows XP :D

[sma]

Peter-

This is great! I just got my first TiVo and signed up for the HMO. I had held off because of the lack of WMA support and this changed everything!

Mostly it is working great, but I've noticed that after listening to a few tracks, I generally get a server error which requires me to shut down and restart the server/publisher app. From reading other messages on the board I gather that this is because I've got A LOT of WMAs and there are issues with predicting the length before conversion.

I was wondering if there are any new developments related to stability or chances for addressing this in the future. Is this a common issue for others as well?

I totally understand that you don't work for TiVo (and that you have a new baby- congratulations!), but just thought I'd ask since the tool is already so useful.

Thanks again for your work
Spencer

[pzand]

I have a new baby??? Really?? Cool! I didn't know that... :p

I actually haven't done much in development lately, but I do have a version of the WmaAudio.dll that seems to fix a few of the issues mentioned by Spencer and others. Mainly the locking up when jumping from track to track.

I haven't made an installer for this DLL, but you can download it here (http://users.planetcable.net/pzand/wmaaudio.dll) if you want. Just backup the current version of this DLL (you'll probably find it in the c:\program files\tivo\desktop folder) and copy this new one in its place.

Make sure TiVoServer and/or TiVoDesktop are not running while you do this.

As usual, I've only tested this on my computer. It may or may not work on yours. If it breaks anything on your computer, you were warned!

Good luck!

Peter

[sma]

:p That's very funny about the baby. I think I've been reading too many TiVo message boards lately and confused you with the author of the WMP plug-in. oops!

Anyway, thanks a bunch for the new DLL. I just installed it (had trouble until I removed the old renamed/backed-up DLL from the directory) and will give it a try right away.

Thanks again!
Spencer

[sma]

The new dll seems to have completely cleared up the problem. Not a hiccup since installation.

Thanks, Peter!

Spencer

[pzand]

That's great!

[jeffweb]

The tool works very well for me with the following problem...

Some of the songs in my music library only play as "continuous play" and thus the Tivo cannot seek within the song. As far as I can tell all the songs on which this is happening are songs that are encoded at 64kbps. None of my songs encoded at 128kbps are exhibiting this problem. Any ideas on this problem?

Actually, almost all 64kbps songs show the problem (Continuous Play), while none of the 128kbps songs do. I can't figure out what is special about some of the 64kbps songs that do work other than they seemed to be very short in length.

Thanks much for the plugin! Any ideas on whats going on with the "Continuous Play" issue? I'm going to re-rip my music in 128kbps WMA anyway as I am not satisfied with the sound quality of 64kbps WMA.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Gai-jin]

The one thing that is holding me back from (Re-)joining the digital audio revolution is support for one file type across the board.

I want to use napster or itunes or such to buy my media, tivo and my pocket pc to play it, and still be able to burn it to CD to play in my Truck. Napster seems to be the better option at this moment, so long as I can get drm wma on tivo...

Gai-jin

[cheitzig]

Hey pzand--

I've been using your plug-in for a couple of months now. Works great.

Recently though, I've tried to "lock down" my home computer a bit-- mostly because I've added other computers to the network, and so have had to remove the firewall from the computer and rely on the hub's firewall.

So, specifically, I removed Adminstrator rights from the user that runs TiVo Server. So when I don't have Administrator rights, I can't play wma's, but when I do, I can.

Interesting. Is this a relic of the WMP libraries, or something that could be fixed? Not a huge problem, really, but I'm trying to be more security conscious...

[pzand]

When logged in as this user, can you play WMA's through WMP?

[cheitzig]

Yes.

[dbschoo]

I'm having the same problem as described by Marc below. Have any suggestions or solutions been posted regarding this particular error?

thanks much in advance for any help! I've been playing around with HMO for about a week now, but don't know if I'll keep it if I can't play my WMAs!

-dbs


Originally posted by mnw2000
I installed it according to the instructions and it did not work.

My PC is Windows 2000.
My Tivo is 80GB version with HMO.

The error is that it lists the WMA music files, but when I try to play them it simply runs through them with "continuous music" underneath it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Marc

[DayDrive]

After installing, I get an error launching TiVo Server.exe

"The procedure entry point WMCreateSyncReader cound not be located in the dynamic link library WMVcore.DLL."

Any ideas what's wrong?

[mystblade]

I dont know what is going on but I did everything you said to get WMA files up and running and, will not even publish the files?

I am thinking about cancel the HMO now. I buy alot of music of napster I guess iam going to try and rip a CD and see how that works'

[tblovell]

Does anyone know why I can't download the plugin? When I follow the link, I get this message:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0046'

Permission denied

/pzand/wmaplugin.asp, line 3

Thanks for any help.

[pzand]

That would be because I messed up the permissions on the web server :)
Try again...

Sorry!

[tblovell]

Got it. Thanks!

[Kanyon71]

Does this plugin support Napster files? I have a bunch of them that I would like ot stream out to my Tivo, I tried it and what happens is that it's just cycles through the songs one after another. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[pzand]

Uhhmmm... I don't see why not? Is WMA file that you got from Napster different from a normal WMA? Can you play them with Windows Media Player?

[morac]

I believe Napster WMA files are protected with DRM. I remember someone once posting that DRM protected WMA files won't play on the TiVo.

The WMP API probably won't allow converting protected WMA files to MP3 for obvious reasons, though I haven't tested it.

[Austin Bike]

You are correct. You need to burn them to CD then rip to MP3.

[thelastvoice]

The process of transcoding wma directly to mp3, or by converting to wav, then burning to a cdr and reripping to mp3, is a bad idea if you care anything about sound quality.

Rob

[Austin Bike]

True, but you have to balance sound quality against being able to listen to them. I'd rather have lesser sound quality and more convenience listening over my Tivo/stereo than trying to listen to higher quality over a computer

[josh_wilson]

Pzand:

Just tried to download the plugin from your website and got the following error:

Server object error 'ASP 0177 : 800706ba'
Server.CreateObject Failed
/pzand/wmaplugin.asp, line 2
The RPC server is unavailable.

Any ideas? Thanks -- looking forward to installing the plugin!

[pzand]

My ISP has been having some troubles lately... I made a little workaround. Wanna try again?

[mdsinger]

Hi,

I've been tinkering around with the WMA plugin for a few days, and I'm seeing the same problem that a others have posted about.

Suddenly, and randomly, my Tivo reports that there was an error on the server while playing a WMA. At this point, the server is pretty pissed off, and I can't play any more songs until I exit and restart the Tivo server.

I have no files with DRM, and it seems to happen randomly, not on any file in particular.

Do you have any updates for yor plugin?

[hutchca]

Same here. I can only play 2 or 3 WMA files before I have to re-start the server.
Any update to Beta1 in the works?

[mdsinger]

I hope so. :-) But it's going to be a very strange problem for the author to debug.

One thing I can add...I tend to use WMA VBR mode...have you noticed at all if you tend to hang on VBR or non-VBR files? As soon as I get a chance, I'm going to rip a CD or two in CBR and see if I still have trouble hanging.

[pzand]

didn't i post a fix for that a while back? i'm on a little pockt pc right now, so reading the whole thread is hard...

i remember posting a bugfix, though...

[mdsinger]

Pzand,

I tried that patch that you had uploaded, and it seems to be working a lot better.

It 's pretty easy to read over that in a thread that's this long. :-)

[Your User Name:]

Great plug-in, pzand! I know it was jokingly referenced on page one, but is there not a way to do the same thing for SHN and FLAC files? I have a 120GB hard drive devoted to music and all the files are SHN or FLAC. It would be great to be able to get those going through my Tivo.

[pzand]

yes, there's no reason why somebody couldn't do the exact same thing for SHN and FLAC. I just use neither format, so I'm not very motivated to work on it.

You could, of course, make a large financial contribution to the "pzand wellness fund" to try and persuade me? :D

[PhillipsMikeR]

I have XP Pro and it work great!!!! I have 1870 music files!!!

[Your User Name:]

How much would it take, pzand? I'm in for $10; anyone else want to pony up? ;)

[Your User Name:]

So does this not work with JavaHMO? I was able to play wma files with Tivo Desktop, but I just installed JavaHMO and now they files aren't recognized.

[pzand]

As far as I know, the two are unrelated. This is a plugin to Tivo Desktop and it actually relies on Tivo Desktop for most of it's operation. I highly doubt that the JavaHMO guys implemented the exact same architecture to support plugins.

Peter

[mkdevo]

Originally posted by Your User Name:
How much would it take, pzand? I'm in for $10; anyone else want to pony up? ;)

count me in!

[pzand]

So let me get this right...

You've both gone out of your way to make sure that your music is archived losslessly, so that you may enjoy the highest quality possible. Now you want me to take this archive, recompress it into 128kbps MP3 on the fly using the fastest possible compression mode, and then stream it into a device that has an audio end stage comparable to your average $5 RadioShack sound card?

:confused:

That said, I'm confused about FLAC. From what I'm reading, you can combine a whole bunch of tracks into one single file and use cue tags to "index" the thing. Do people actually use that?

Peter

[Your User Name:]

Well, I have gone out of my way to archive music losslessly, yes. Being able to quick access to those files through HMO would be nice, but that won't replace my CDs of that music when I want to really get down to listening. It really isn't a big deal to me if you decide not to take on this project. In fact, I really had no idea the audio was so poor on a Tivo. The few files I have in WMA format are highly compressed and do sound like crap. I always figured that better quality files would sound a whole lot better. Again, not as good as lossless, but it's nice to have options.

I have no idea about the technical details of FLAC. I do know that it is a lossless compression form that is gaining in popularity. One of the things I like about it is that there is a plug-in for Nero Burning Rom that allows you to convert to WAV on the fly while you burn CDs. The plug-in is probably similar to your program for WMA. It is nice to be able to avoid the decompression step that is necessary for SHN.

P.S. would compressing it to 256kbps MP3 on the fly make a big improvement/be possible?

[gordho]

Originally posted by pzand


That said, I'm confused about FLAC. From what I'm reading, you can combine a whole bunch of tracks into one single file and use cue tags to "index" the thing. Do people actually use that?

Peter


one reason for this would be to rip an entire cd that is a continuous mix (dj mix, opera, etc). you rip it as one file and create a cue sheet. that way when it goes to the next track it is truely seemless, just like listening to the cd. when you load the file up in a media player that supports cue sheets you see all the individual tracks in the play list.

[bbruck]

I'm using Windows Media Player 10. I downloaded the Windows Media Runtime as suggested in the first post (which may be the problem); Folders and wma files "publish" successfully but when I try and play them from the TV I get an unrecognized format error.

[M82A1A]

I too have WM10 and I was able to make the plug in work. When I was installing the Windows Media Runtime, I noticed it said that it was for WMP9, so I did not install it. The plug in worked, so try without the Runtime..

[jack_richins]

The plugin works great if I'm logged in as an admin, but not as a limited user (which is what I normally run as). When I'm logged in as a limited user, from my TiVo is shows no playable files in the folder. But from an Admin account it works perfectly. Any ideas why? Any chance of fixing it?

[bbruck]

Humm - the first time I installed it as you suggested, Phil, it did seem to work - at least for one song (perhaps it was in the root? But now I see the list of folders, and in each the songs, and when I select a song I see the name but no other information. When I attempt to play it I get an error.

I basically just dragged all the folders in My Music to the published area in publisher. Was that the correct thing to do v. going inside each folder and dragging the songs?

Anyway - I'm hoping someone else has gotten this to work w/ Media Player 10. Takers?

[M82A1A]

Well, I published my music by putting the "My Music" folder in the publisher and have had no problems. I have noticed though, that if I leave my music PC on for a long time, I have to reset it to get TiVo to play music from it. After you had an error, did you try a restart?

FYI, I have had no trouble playing WMAs from sub-directories.

[campybob]

This is my first post so please be kind. I downloaded the WMA patch and installed per the instructions, not including the runtime. However, now I get the following error message when I try and restart Tivo Publisher or Tivo Server:
"The string list does not allow duplicates"
I have Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10. All the WMA files are stored in a separate directory on a separate drive (F drive)

Any ideas?

[prjman]

I couldn't tell from the earlier posts. Does the WMA Patch solve the problem with DMR?
I haven't tried this yet, but it sounds awesome, especially if it can use purchased files!

[jhwpbm]

Installed all as instructed (except I downloaded the latest Microsoft Media runtime for Media Player 10 instead of your link, though I tried it first without runtime at all) and no go with TiVo Desktop 1.3. I get the "This folder does not contaqin any playable music.". Any ideas?

[elroyjetson]

I have a Windows Server 2003 home network. I added the WMA conversion files and it works fine.

This is good news because I don't have to convert all my files now! Wooo hoo. Happy Geek!

[tades]

Downloaded and installed, works great for awhile then gives me a server error. Any thoughts? Thanks

[elroyjetson]

Originally posted by tades
Downloaded and installed, works great for awhile then gives me a server error. Any thoughts? Thanks

Were you replying to my post about Server 2003 specifically or a gneral error installed on a client OS?

If Windows 2003 is your platform, I found that the TiVo beacon service was unstable on server. In fairness to the WMA fix, I have three servers and installed TiVo on my lowest-power, lowest-RAM server. I don't put beta software on my production boxes.

So, I just put it on both my XP and my wife's XP boxes and it works fine. Give it a large cache - smaller caches tend to cause crashes.

When you attempt to access WMAs on TiVo and get the server error, you will want to stop the server component (the little black tivo guy in your system tray) and then restart it. This has solved my server errors.

My experience has been to refrain from a lot of inputs into the service. When I select music and let it run, life is good. When I select lots of different music, eventually the server component bails out and I have to restart it.

It's still cool and I am sure there will be updates in the future.

[elroyjetson]

Originally posted by pzand
yes, there's no reason why somebody couldn't do the exact same thing for SHN and FLAC. I just use neither format, so I'm not very motivated to work on it.

You could, of course, make a large financial contribution to the "pzand wellness fund" to try and persuade me? :D

Pzand,

I am all for rewarding developers for their work that I use. I'd be willing to contribute some cash to you to compensate for your efforts and also perhaps to create some incentive to work on resolving the problems that can be experienced in the use of your add-in.

Do you have a PayPal account?

Dave

[OU812]

I have HMO on a wireless network. I tried to install the beta program and I get the "server error". I have WMP 10 and windows XP. Has anyone else gotten this to work with this configuration?

[cmulder]

Installed the plugin and reinstalled, but it doesn't work. I can see the WMA files and publish them and see them in HMO, but they file doesn't play--just skips it and goes to the next file.

[wfalcon]

Many thanks PZAND - almost two years and the patch still works!!!! - I'm rrunning windows XP service pack 2 with a Tivo Series 2 unit

[OU812]

Wfalcon,
Did you have to install the window media runtime file, if so do you recall what version you used? I would really love to make this work.
Thanks!

[VinceA]

I'm pretty sure this has been discussed but I can't find the thread (sorry)... Is the WMA plugin compatible with TiVoDesktop 2.0? Right now I've got 1.3 on one machine here that serves up music while I've got 2.0 on this laptop. I'd like to bring the other machine up to 2.0 but I'd hate to loose the ability to play my music collection.

[aadam101]

I know there was a thread but I couldn't find it either. My WMA'a won't work with 2.0. Someone in the other thread asked if it was possible to use both versions. I don't know if it is.

[TiVoBill]

Originally posted by VinceA
I'm pretty sure this has been discussed but I can't find the thread (sorry)... Is the WMA plugin compatible with TiVoDesktop 2.0? Right now I've got 1.3 on one machine here that serves up music while I've got 2.0 on this laptop. I'd like to bring the other machine up to 2.0 but I'd hate to loose the ability to play my music collection.

During the beta for TD 2.0, we ran into some issues with the WMA plugin that pzand created not working correctly. Others have reported that it does work for them though, so I'm not sure exactly what the issue is.

[aadam101]

When I first read WMA's didn't work I tried it myself and they didn't work. I just tried again and they seem to work fine. Strange.

[Maverickster]

It works fine for me with 2.0, as does Jem's wml plugin for the Media Library.

--Mav

[VinceA]

Did either/both of you have Desktop 1.x installed then update it to 2.0 or did you start from nothing?

[Maverickster]

Yes, I had 1.3 (or whatever it was) installed before upgrading. I did not uninstall it manually nor did I uninstall the plugin. Rather, I just installed 2.0 "over" 1.3 (although the installer said it was uninstalling 1.3), and it worked right away. no problems.

--Mav

[VinceA]

Thanks... I'll upgrade my 1.3 machine this weekend and hopefully it'll turn out like yours did

[SonicJMC]

It's playing them at like double speed. This is ****ing hillarious! Especially since one of the tracks is Buggs Bunny singing! OMG this is funny!

[theosophe74]

I just wanted to thank you for making this plugin available.

I'm running Windows XP SP2, WMP 10, and Tivo Desktop 2.0. I followed your instructions, but only installed the plugin (and not the Windows Media Runtime), and now I can access all non-DRM-protected WMAs from my Series 2 Tivo.

Thanks again,
Mike

[pzand]

You're very welcome!
(I can't believe this thread is still alive!!)

Peter

[SpaceAce69]

Oh WOW!!

Thanks so very much!! I had moved all of my 400 and some CDs to the computer and sold the actual CDs...encoded in WMA...

Until now, I couldn't play them on the TIVO...really nice to be able to control them by remote!

Thanks a MILLION!
SpaceAce69

[WoodyL]

Last time I checked, this plugin would not support streaming .wma files. Any plans to add that?

[pzand]

yeah, that _would_ be neat, wouldn't it? I have a couple of stations that stream wma that I listen to on my PC. It'd be great to be able to use tivo for those. Unfortunately, I also have a lot of other things on my plate that must take priority.

So many toys... so little time...

Peter

[WoodyL]

yeah, that _would_ be neat, wouldn't it? I have a couple of stations that stream wma that I listen to on my PC. It'd be great to be able to use tivo for those. Unfortunately, I also have a lot of other things on my plate that must take priority.

So many toys... so little time...

Peter

I understand. Maybe sometime down the road.

[Maynard1]

Hey, I'm new to the TiVo experience, and I didn't even know you could network the Tivo when I bought it, let alone play music through it. I really appreciate your work pzand. It saved me a lot of time converting files.

Working great with my Tivo S2 40 hr with 7.1 and Desktop 2.0.

[iking]

This functionality is why I bought a Tivo, especially since I have DirecTV and could have purchased their DVR. But the DTV unit doesn't do music, and one of my coworkers told me of your plugin that would access my WMA collection.

It does. Oh, it's on a Windows 2000 Server box, FYI.

So when's beta 2? ;) Cheers -- Ian

[bixb0012]

Back in 02/04, Cheitzig posted a question pertaining to the WMA plugin not working with non-administrator accounts. As far as I could read in this thread, the issue has never been resolved.

Are there folks out there who run TivoDesktop/TivoServer under a non-administrator account and get their WMAs to playback with this plugin?

Every aspect (photos, MP3s, TivoToGo) of TivoServer works fine for me when running under a 'User' account, but the WMA plugin will not function. The music folders show up but no songs are listed in them. I can see the MP3s in a folder that has mixed WMAs and MP3s.

Any thoughts are appreciated; I have tinkered for a while and am out of ideas

[bherwig]

Peter,

I discovered this plug-in last night...AMAZING! It worked the first time, with no hiccups...literally within 5 minutes I could play WMA files...even those ripped in the lossless format. GREAT JOB! With all the TiVo upgrades etc, I'm amazed that something created in 2 years still works!

Two questions:

1. Is the WMA to MP3 conversion taking place on my PC or the TiVo unit?

2. I understand that the WMA files are converted "real time" into MP3s @ 128 Kbps ...is there anyway to have the conversion done at a higher quality MP3...say 192 Kbps or 256 Kbps?

Thank you.

Bruce

[pzand]

bixb0012... I apologize for the late reply, but I don't have clue as to how to solve your problem. The plugin indicates to TiVo Desktop that it can handle WMA->MP3 format conversion. Then when Desktop wants to play a WMA file, it basically just passes a filename to the plugin, which then spits out chunks of MP3 (sort of, anyway). Since you don't see any WMA files, it's almost like the plugin never registers or starts when TiVo Desktop starts, and Desktop just doesn't know it has the ability to play WMA. Did you check permissions on the actual plugin files?

Bruce... I too am amazed that the thing still works :)
In all actuality, I know that the TiVo guys have worked very hard to maintain compatibility. So I have to redirect all kudos to them... :up:

As for your questions:
1) The WMA->MP3 conversion takes place on the PC.
2) I played with this, but I could never hear the difference on higher bitrates. Part of me says the TiVo's audio output circuitry was designed for TV quality audio. Good, but not great. So I let lame (which does the actual conversion behind the scenes) use it's default of 128.

Btw... if somebody with some C experience wants to change this (or anything else for that matter!), I'd be happy to share source code.

Peter

[jiffyjeff68]

HELP!! I'm new to Tivo and these plugins.

I downloaded the plugin and it works fine for my mp3's and wma's....
BUT when I try to play all my files from my main folder (as if I had a large jukebox) the Tivo server gets an error and I have to restart. I have a large amount of music files but I'm sure there are many users out there with more. Has anyone seen this issue? Am I doing anything wrong?

THANKS!!!!

[bixb0012]

Roughly a month ago, I posted a problem with running WMA Plugin under Windows XP limited account. I decided to turn on auditing for my entire c: drive and registry in order to see what might be causing the problem (thanks to pzand for pointing me in the right direction).

The problem was a permissions problem but not with the file itself. The problem originates with permissions in the registry. I installed both Tivo software and WMA plugin as administrator, but I was wanting to run the Tivo server as a dedicated Tivo user. The Tivo software was working fine, but Tivo server could not see or play WMAs after installing WMA Plugin.

I did two adjustments in the registry, and now WMA Plugin works great. I gave the Tivo user (or whatever user wants to run Tivo server and listen to WMAs) full permissions to the following two registry keys:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tivo
\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.wma

I have not had time to narrow it down, but I think the second registry is the only one that needs adjustment.

I was excited to get the plugin working with restricted permissions. This plugin is a lifesaver.

[pbanders]

HELP!! I'm new to Tivo and these plugins.

I downloaded the plugin and it works fine for my mp3's and wma's....
BUT when I try to play all my files from my main folder (as if I had a large jukebox) the Tivo server gets an error and I have to restart. I have a large amount of music files but I'm sure there are many users out there with more. Has anyone seen this issue? Am I doing anything wrong?

THANKS!!!!

I've had the same issue and have never seen a solution for the problem.

[morac]

I've had the same issue and have never seen a solution for the problem.If you have a very large amount of music files the TiVo may timeout before the server has time to build the playlist and send it to the TiVo. My advice is to make several playlists (.m3u or .pls) instead of trying to play every music file at once. Remember if you have the child folders option enabled, it will have to search through all your child folders to get the total music file count. This can take time.

[wilypueo]

Just another thank you post for pzand. I finally switched over to a series 2 Tivo from series 1, mainly since I am ditching land line service for my home. The wma to mp3 conversion is a lifesaver. Now, I have to decide what do with my redundant roku soundbridge :o

[dchas1968]

I am trying to get downloaded Real Rhapsody subscription songs to play. They are stored as WMA files with the following properties:

Audio Codec: WMA 9.1

License details:
This file can be played until 7/12/2005
Callaborative play for this file is not allowed
This file cannot be burned
This file cannot be synchronized
The license for this file cannot be backed up

The files are sitting on my computer. When I try to play them with Tivo they just sit on 0:00. Tivo sees the file but it will not play.

[pzand]

dchas,

unfortunately, this is a known "issue". From what I understand, the WMA rights management license explicitly forbids transcoding the file into something that's not licensed, even if that transcoding is only done to be able to stream and listen to it.

This is exactly what the plugin does. It temporarilly transcodes the WMA into MP3 so that TiVo can play it. Even though this isn't the case, in theory something could "cache" or record the stream and play it back whenever, thus bypassing the licensing in the file.

Sorry...

Peter

[jmannie]

I was so disappointed that TIVO did not support WMA's. Definitely something they did not make clear up front. I was all fired up to play my sizeable music library (yes, WMA's) only to find out it was completely useless after getting HMO all set up and ready to roll. A huge downer.

Then came you to the rescue! How cool is your plug-in!? :cool: 10 minutes of reading the thread to verify positive feedback, following the clear instructions you gave and now I'm chillin' with the tunes I love over my TIVO. Awesome! Thanks for sharing the goods! :up:

Only wish now we could crack that lousy encryption thing on the downloaded files from Napster. Jeez, I'm paying my monthly fees, I'm buying my downloads, I should at least be able to flip those to TIVO as well. grrr!

[ersheido]

First, I would like to commend you for creating this plugin and saving thousdands of people from having to convert their music collections to MP3. It works great.

However, I'm having a problem with my playlists (M3U). Even though I can play my wma files directly by going to the album, I cannot see them in the playlist.

If I have a playlist with WMA files only, Tivo shows it as not having any files. If I have MP3 and WMA files in the playlist, it only shows MP3 files only.

Any ideas?

[Norgoth]

Before I download the plugin I just want to confirm that this will not allow the tivo to play my downloaded napster files. The napster files are wma, but they are also DRMed. All my music on my computer is from napster.

[morac]

Before I download the plugin I just want to confirm that this will not allow the tivo to play my downloaded napster files. The napster files are wma, but they are also DRMed. All my music on my computer is from napster.
Correct.

[Karl_Schubert]

I installed this last night on my Series 2 and it worked great. I did have to install the runtime and even though it was for Release 9 vs. the Release 10 of the current Windows Media Player it worked fine.

Thank you, Peter!

[Kalnel]

Another happy user reporting in...no problems using XP (Home), Desktop 2.2, and WMP10. (Like the previous poster, I had to install Runtime, too.)

So, anyone have any ideas about setting up playlists now???

Thanks for the great work -- work Tivo should have done themselves!

kal

[WesTivo]

I just installed the plug in and converter. I am running Tivo Desktop 2.2 on Windows XP.

After download the files I can now read the files on my TiVo menu but they will not play. What am I doing wrong?

[morac]

I just installed the plug in and converter. I am running Tivo Desktop 2.2 on Windows XP.

After download the files I can now read the files on my TiVo menu but they will not play. What am I doing wrong?
The plugin can't play any DRM protected WMA files. Make sure they aren't protected.

[granth]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for taking time to add this, what should be, a valuable plug-in to the TiVo community. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make it work. I'm wondering if it's because protected songs (like those from the new legal Napster) can't be published to the TiVo desktop? I haven't actually purchased the songs, just downloaded them, but they can play back fine in Windows Media Player. It appears that I can publish them--they show up on both my computer and on the TV--but I can't play them back. I see the song title and artist, but no info on track duration, etc. When I try to play them anyway, I 've also got this error message--"abnormal program termination" and the server fails.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Grant

[pzand]

Hi Grant,

It may very well be, but I didn't think it would terminate that abruptly :)
Have you tried with songs that your know for a fact are not protected?

Peter

[Phantom_66]

My problem is very similar. My music collection is a variety of things, from cd's I've ripped to things I've paid for online. I have two series 2 Tivos networked and they played all my MP3 stuff fine, but - of course - would not play WMA files. After downloading and following the instructions, my TIVOS won't play any files. It recognizes them and even gives track length, but it simply doens't play. Any siggestions?

[Phantom_66]

Q quick update - after rebooting and re-starting TIVO Desktop, my DVR will now read some files. When I try to play something it doesn't like, it freezes and crashes the TIVO Desktop application. Wassup???

[ejrogo11]

I am having a problem. Followed steps (made sure server wasn't running) and now I can see the published files through tivo, but they won't play? And after I try I get an error on the computer that says "Abnormal Program Termination" on the Tivoserver.exe. Does anyone know how to fix this so it works? Have already tried uninstall and re-install.
Thanks

[plutodude100]

Another happy user reporting in...no problems using XP (Home), Desktop 2.2, and WMP10. (Like the previous poster, I had to install Runtime, too.)

So, anyone have any ideas about setting up playlists now???

Thanks for the great work -- work Tivo should have done themselves!

kal

If you want the ability to have .wma files and .mp3 files or any other music format in a playlist on your tivo download the TiVo Windows Media Library Support plugin which tranfers your windows media playlists onto the TiVo. Now you can organize your music in sync with Windows Media Player! By Album, Artist, Genre, and you can have custom or automatic playlist on your TiVo. Note: This software This plug-in is not a format converter: it does not do the job of transcoding Windows audio files into mp3s. There are other plug-ins that do this. So you will still need pzands .wma plugin. Also this can be somewhat of a pain in the butt seeing that you can not go into windows media player while TiVo desktop is running. Please follow the install instructions EXACTLY you can read those instructions and download the plugin by Googleing for TiVo Windows Media Library Support


Enjoy!

[Dan203]

If you want to play formats other then WMA or MP3 try my Universal Audio Plug-in (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=295778). It uses DirectSHow tecnology to transcode pretty much any format you can play in Windows Media Player.

Dan

[SchtuperMan]

Installed your WMA plug-in yesterday. Works like a champ on XP Pro. 99% of my 40+ GB music library is in WMA format and I am truly grateful. :up:

[tonyf3]

Quicktime!

[Dan203]

Quicktime!

Huh?

You're a Mac user so simply installing LAME gives you access to pretty much any format Quicktime can play. However PC users have to install plugins like this or my universal audio plugin to get support for formats other then MP3.

Dan

[mikemai]

Thanks for doing the leg work on this one. I generally don't corrupt systems with uncertified add ons (work machine), but this was a great experience.

Mike