Suddenly iTivo & kmttg downloads stop towards end.

[kilofox]

Prior to this week all my downloads with iTivo or kmttg would always completely download. Now the are always incomplete.. the download stops at around 95%.

Any ideas why this is happening?

[Yoav]

the tivo sometimes lies about the actual size of the movie, which is why it might be transferring all it has but still being reported as 95%. iTiVo generally retries a few times, but will finally accept the 'truncated' movie if that's all it can get.

[moyekj]

the tivo sometimes lies about the actual size of the movie, which is why it might be transferring all it has but still being reported as 95%. iTiVo generally retries a few times, but will finally accept the 'truncated' movie if that's all it can get. Actually the Tivo is not lying per se. The actual file size stored on the Tivo is the size that Tivo reports (it reports in base 10 not base 2). However when using TTG as you know there is a lot of processing happening to convert to encrypted mpeg2 program stream and the resulting file size output is ~5-10% smaller than what it was on the Tivo. I think part of that is Tivo's native ty storage format contains more information that it uses during playback to make trick play functions work better/smoother. That information is dropped when converting to mpeg2 program stream. The way I determined that is if you use the &Format=video%2Fx-tivo-raw-tts formatting string to download a file without conversion (which is what MRV is doing) you will see the file size matches the Tivo reported file size, but of course the resulting file you get is useless since you can't decrypt it or do anything else useful with it (including sending it back to Tivo).

Anyway back to the OP question yes you shouldn't go by the percentage reported by kmttg (and I presume iTivo as well) as an indication of how complete the transfer really was because of the above explantation. At least for kmttg if you don't get an error message when the download completes that means the download completed successfully. And of course you can check with your media player or mediainfo that the total time of the video is complete.

[kilofox]

The 95% thing is no more than an estimation... not something reported by Tivo or any program.

What I meant is that I am only getting 95% of the movie downloaded. When I look at the movie I can see by viewing that the hole movie was recorded... I just cant download it completely.

[Yoav]

The 95% thing is no more than an estimation... not something reported by Tivo or any program.

What I meant is that I am only getting 95% of the movie downloaded. When I look at the movie I can see by viewing that the hole movie was recorded... I just cant download it completely.

Hmm.. is this happening on every movie or a particular one? If it's just one film, then it might be corrupted on the tivo in a way that it can still play it, but sends an error when trying to transmit.

If it's on all files, then yeah something is 'odd'. First thing to try is reboot the tivo, the router, and your computer. Then if it happens again, you're gonna need to look at the logs (in the case of iTiVo, the log is in ~/Library/Logs/iTiVo.log) and see if there's something 'interesting' in there.. like a useful error message...

[moyekj]

The 95% thing is no more than an estimation... not something reported by Tivo or any program.

What I meant is that I am only getting 95% of the movie downloaded. When I look at the movie I can see by viewing that the hole movie was recorded... I just cant download it completely. Make sure you don't have firewall or anti-virus software that is limiting file sizes to 2GB. For example Kaspersky (sp?) is known to have that problem. If the failed downloads in question are ~ 2GB in size then I would suspect that is the problem.
Other than that if it is more an isolated problem restricted to 1 or 2 recordings it could be glitches in those recordings are preventing transfers from completing no matter what program you use - i.e. the Tivo server is failing to serve up the entire file. If that's the problem you can try recording the program again if it airs again or if you have another Tivo you can try transferring to that Tivo and then offloading it with TTG.