Moving Video to Tivo (divx?)

[skishopmatt]

Hey All -

I don't think I'm breaking any rules here by posting this as I'm not referring to native Tivo Files.

I have been burning DVD's to my computer as MPG4's and then watching them on my Tivo with the transfer options. It works great, but they are HUGE files.

I was just curious if anyone knows of a way to play DivX files on your Tivo. I know it's not built in, but is there any way to do that? The dvd to Divx is so much more efficient and much smaller so I'd love to determine a way to do that.

Thanks so much for this great comunity, I hope to become an active member!

Matt

[davezatz]

Only MPEG2 at this time... you could try reencoding to get a smaller file, but in the long run might not save you any time (though it would save space).

[classicsat]

Is there any way to "encode on the fly"?

I want to recode, manually in my fair time, my current collection of TiVo compatible MPEG2 isto DiVx or something space efficient. and have Galleon (running on my Fc Linux machine. Pick those up and convert them on the fly back to MPEG2 as the TiVo fetches them.

[davezatz]

Is there any way to "encode on the fly"?

Technically, it seems like it could be possible in the same way LAME or Shoutcast convert audio broadcasts to MP3 on the fly. But I think video is more complex and processor intensive to transcode so it's not realistic now. Then again Slingbox is picking up a video stream and rebroadcasting it live. Hmmmmm. I need to take a closer look at some of VLC's features...

[Dan203]

Actually transcoding to MPEG-2 on the fly would be possible provided you had a fairly modern PC (2GHz+ 512MB RAM) However TiVo does not currently offer an SDK to develope video based plug-ins for TiVo Desktop, so the only way to do it would be to roll your own system complete with server. (or maybe hook into Galleon if you're good with Java)

Dan

[davezatz]

Yeah that seems to be the crux... the TiVo would most likely need a complete MPEG2 file to transfer, though you could watch it in progress once it has a buffer. I don't know if Galleon would work as a proxy since HME doesn't support any video options yet.

But if you had a widget that could convert very quickly and automatically it might get you closer to storing video in a preferred format. The widget could also go back and clean up the MPEG2 files once TiVo has loaded them.

[Dan203]

The current audio streaming plug-in SDK works by requesting chunks of data from the plug-in via a callback function. I assume that the video side of things works the same way. In fact it's probably easier to write a video related plug-in since it doesn't actually need to stream it just needs to send TiVo the data so it can store it on it's hard drive. If the data was produced in less then realtime the user would just have to wait for enough of it to buffer to the TiVo before starting to watch.

Dan

[DVDerek]

I believe transfering video to the TiVo requires that the file be complete. I haven't done a lot of testing with it, but I was converting an episode of Lost from DivX to MPEG2 with Videora. I tried to transfer the episode to my TiVo when the transcode was about 50% complete, but the transfer failed immediately.

[HDTiVo]

There must be a way to trick programs into thinking a complete file of a certain extension already exists. This would fool TD, if necessary, into starting the "stream" while the transcode is in progress.

[Dan203]

Videora is probably just grabbing exclusive access to the file which is blocking the TiVo Desktop software from reading it. Find a program that doesn't do that and you can probably get it to work.

Or you can just wait. A contact of mine at TiVo said they should be releasing an updated SDK soon.

Dan