Convert to MPEG?

[Mastiff]

I'm sure this must have been covered a million times, but the search results are just not helping. How do you convert .tivo files to MPEG? What I want to do is cut a little section from a show and put it on youtube. People seem to do it all the time, but everything I've found on Google points to a thing called direct show dump. When I tried to use it, it complained that my .NET framework is too new (it wants an old version). So, what's the trick?

[ajwees41]

I'm sure this must have been covered a million times, but the search results are just not helping. How do you convert .tivo files to MPEG? What I want to do is cut a little section from a show and put it on youtube. People seem to do it all the time, but everything I've found on Google points to a thing called direct show dump. When I tried to use it, it complained that my .NET framework is too new (it wants an old version). So, what's the trick?

what version of .NEt do you have? You can have more than one version of it installed.

[Mastiff]

I have 2.0 I think. When I first got the error I assumed I had nothing and installed the latest.

Someone else pointed me to this thing called TVHarmony Autopilot. It has a bunch of features I don't care about, but it might be able to convert too. I'm testing it out now.

[greg_burns]

DSD installer stupidly insists on having .NET 1.1 installed. You can install it, it won't hurt.

I prefer using TivoDecode.

http://www.gmonweb.com/portal/CodingFun/Downloads/tabid/54/Default.aspx

Considering you want to edit the video. I would download the VideoReDo trial. It will open .tivo files directly.

[qz3fwd]

VideoReDo is awesome. I use it every day and seamlessly edits tivo files.

[Mastiff]

Videoredo did the trick. I was unable to view the output MPG with windows media player though. Any ideas? I have WMP 11 and it claims to be all updated.

[greg_burns]

Videoredo did the trick. I was unable to view the output MPG with windows media player though. Any ideas? I have WMP 11 and it claims to be all updated.

Did you have TivoDesktop Plus? It was probably providing the MPEG-2 codec when it saw a .tivo file. Now that it is a freed .mpg you'll need to provide your own.

Try installing this MPEG-2 codec pack.
http://www.cole2k.net/?display=Codec-Pack-Standard

[classicsat]

Doing so (posting on the internet) would be a violation of your TOS. The video is watermarked and can be traced back to you. I don't know if the conversion to FLV would retain the watermarking though.

[Dan203]

Did you have TivoDesktop Plus? It was probably providing the MPEG-2 codec when it saw a .tivo file. Now that it is a freed .mpg you'll need to provide your own.

The TiVo Desktop Plus codecs are compatible with standard MPEG files, they may just not be set to the right priority for standard MPEG files. Unfortunately DirectShow in Windows is a horrid mess when it comes to figuring out what's happening and why. You're best bet for figuring it out, if you're the technical type, is to get yourself a copy of GraphEdit and render a .mpg file and see which filters are used. If they're not the right ones then get yourself a DirectShow filter manager program and use it to systematically lower the merit value, or simply uninstall, the filters causing the issue until you get a graph which can properly play your files. It's not that complicated once you get the hang of it, but there can be a fairly steep learning curve.

Dan

[litkaj]

DSD installer stupidly insists on having .NET 1.1 installed.

It's not "stupidly insisting", it simply won't work with 2.0 or 3.0 as there were breaking changes between 1.1 and 2.0. Apps compiled for 1.1 need 1.1 to run.

[greg_burns]

It's not "stupidly insisting", it simply won't work with 2.0 or 3.0 as there were breaking changes between 1.1 and 2.0. Apps compiled for 1.1 need 1.1 to run.

Uh, no.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/Aa570326.aspx

Here it is extracted (ie, no .msi installer). It runs just fine with only 2.0.

http://home.comcast.net/~greg_burns/DirectShowDump.zip

Greg
MCSD.NET
;)

[hummingbird_206]

I transferred an episode of Heroes recorded on an S3 in best quality to my computer. Then used VideoReDo trial version 2.5.6.512 to open the .tivo file, ran AdDetective and saved file as .mpeg. When I view the .mpeg with WM11, there's a constantly changing semi-transparent line across the top of the screen. It looks like an upside down equalizer display. Any idea what caused this, and more importantly, how to get rid of this?

[greg_burns]

I transferred an episode of Heroes recorded on an S3 in best quality to my computer. Then used VideoReDo trial version 2.5.6.512 to open the .tivo file, ran AdDetective and saved file as .mpeg. When I view the .mpeg with WM11, there's a constantly changing semi-transparent line across the top of the screen. It looks like an upside down equalizer display. Any idea what caused this, and more importantly, how to get rid of this?

The dancing white line is commonly thought to contain the closed captioning and special Tivo ad Thumb Up commercial info in the VBI line.

Regardless of what it is used for by Tivo, it is usually not seen on your TV due to overscan.

I believe, I've read the codec used by TivoDesktop Plus also truncates that line during playback. But you would have to have the Plus version and also resave from VR as a .tivo file to get that feature to work.

[purrsnick716]

VideoReDoSuite works very well, but the resultant video files seem much smaller that when I was using Prish's Download Dump Utility. One long video was about 6 GB -- using the Prish application. Later, using the VideoReDo suite, the same video (which looks quite good) was between 3-4 GB. Prish's free Download Dump Utility was simple and very good, and allowed one to use other video editing software. While VideoReDo is very good, I'd like to find a simple application like Prish's that will work in XP and Windows 7. And what is TiVO's Decoder GuI?

[steve614]

And what is TiVO's Decoder GuI?

http://www.gmonweb.com/portal/CodingFun/tabid/53/EntryID/3/Default.aspx

[Dan203]

VideoReDoSuite works very well, but the resultant video files seem much smaller that when I was using Prish's Download Dump Utility. One long video was about 6 GB -- using the Prish application. Later, using the VideoReDo suite, the same video (which looks quite good) was between 3-4 GB. Prish's free Download Dump Utility was simple and very good, and allowed one to use other video editing software. While VideoReDo is very good, I'd like to find a simple application like Prish's that will work in XP and Windows 7. And what is TiVO's Decoder GuI?

This is most likely caused by NULL packets. Some TV stations will instert what are know as NULL packets into their broadcast stream so that the mux rate of the stream remains constant regardless of how much is actually required by the audio and video. These NULL packets are just a bunch of 0s and have absolutely no bearing on the quality of the video. They are only added to make it a little easier to broadcast the stream.

The reason there is a size difference between what VideoReDo outputs and what programs like DirectShow Dump or tivodecode output is because VideoReDo re-muxes the file during output and in the process removes all these unnecessary NULL packets. DSD and tivodecode are simple decrypters that just decrypt the TiVo files as is. So they never even look at the stream close enough to realize it's full of NULL packets.

So the quality of the two files you have are identical, the only difference is the one from DirectShow Dump contains a bunch of worthless data that's just taking up space on your hard drive.

Dan