HD Transfer to Mac Fails, Series 2 Fine

[amiesue]

I recently added an HD to my setup, and while I can see my shows with both TiVo transfer and TiVoDecode Manager with my HD it doesn't transfer the entire show. In fact, it shows as about 1 gb for a 30 min show but stops at various points (anywhere from 300-700 mb) but doesn't produce an error. If I then run these through Visual Hub the audio is scratchy and full of loud pops. If I play it in Toast with the TiVo Video Player, they are fine. One other note - when using TiVoDecode Manager it actually hits a certain size and starts over and will do this three times before just stopping. I verified there is no problem with the video at that point, and have powered off my TiVo.

I also tried transferring from the HD to the Series 2 and brought it over that way but had the same problem.

Any ideas on what this is? I am at the latest on everything (TiVo service updates, Toast updates, etc). It kills me not to be able to get the shows!

Thanks

[gbrown]

If you have found anything out, please PM me.

[Rdian06]

I recently added an HD to my setup, and while I can see my shows with both TiVo transfer and TiVoDecode Manager with my HD it doesn't transfer the entire show. In fact, it shows as about 1 gb for a 30 min show but stops at various points (anywhere from 300-700 mb) but doesn't produce an error.

How is your HD connected to your home network? How is the Mac?

[gbrown]

My TiVoS3 is connected via Ethernet to a Buffalo MIMO Router and WAP. That is connected via Ethernet to a Netgear Gigabit switch that connects my Mac/PC/NAS/Printer. So, in effect, it is Ethernet via two switches.

Remember that the issue is that the ".tivo" file pulled via Roxio's TiVoTransfer works, others produce the click. So I am wondering if this is a codec issue? Maybe a buffer size issue since that would explain the pops.

[Yoav]

I recently added an HD to my setup, and while I can see my shows with both TiVo transfer and TiVoDecode Manager with my HD it doesn't transfer the entire show. In fact, it shows as about 1 gb for a 30 min show but stops at various points (anywhere from 300-700 mb) but doesn't produce an error. If I then run these through Visual Hub the audio is scratchy and full of loud pops. If I play it in Toast with the TiVo Video Player, they are fine. One other note - when using TiVoDecode Manager it actually hits a certain size and starts over and will do this three times before just stopping. I verified there is no problem with the video at that point, and have powered off my TiVo.

I also tried transferring from the HD to the Series 2 and brought it over that way but had the same problem.

Any ideas on what this is? I am at the latest on everything (TiVo service updates, Toast updates, etc). It kills me not to be able to get the shows!

Thanks

Have you tried iTiVo (http://itivo.googlecode.com/) instead? It fixes a bunch of bugs related to TivoDecodeManager and S3/TivoHD...

However, you might just have a bad recording, and there's not much that can be done about it.

[gbrown]

I just found iTiVo. I'll try it tonight. The problem is persistent and not applicable to one single recording.

[Yoav]

I just found iTiVo. I'll try it tonight. The problem is persistent and not applicable to one single recording.

One thing to try if that fails is to run mencoder or ffmpeg manually on your .tivo file. It might outputs some useful information about the audio (sounds like there's a problem re-encoding the audio stream to match the frames... but that's just a guess...)

iTiVo won't do anything magical.. it's just a front-end to mencoder, but it does use a much newer version of mencoder (and associated libraries) than TivoDecodeManager did.

[GKevinK]

FWIW... I have successfully used iTiVo to download and process a high def program (I'm just getting started) from my TiVoHD onto my PPC/Leopard machine. It did take a couple of attempts to find resolution and bit rate choices that resulted in a successful file on my G5. For me, successful is defined by having it in a format that can be imported into iMovieHD for editing which has smooth video and audio in sync. The program was natively 1080i. My first attempts were trying to obtain full 1080p, and those weren't all that successful (lots of jumpy video and audio sync issues.) Eventually I tried dialing back the resolution a bit by half (960 x 540), and this seems to be quite successful. I set the iMovieHD project to 1080i, and the import and editing went fine. After that I had a couple of iterations of trying export resolutions, and the first fully successful one was using the AppleTV target selection. The resulting movie file is at the same resolution that I had iTiVo configured for (960 x 540), and it went happily into my iTunes library and looks great.

Not exactly the full available resolution, but I think it's one that should be completely acceptable on my 1080p projector. Much more playing around to do yet.

Kevin

[gbrown]

Switching to iTiVo worked just fine.