New program for 1 step TTG downloads, decryption, encoding - kmttg

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by innocentfreak

This is really disappointing. I may end up switching Media Center to my primary DVR and my Elite as a backup until this happens or TiVo releases the SDK. This is assuming they actually give anyone other than a major company access.

I can't see myself going back to trying to juggle season passes on the TiVos without KMTTG. Without KMTTG's RPC functionality, Media Center becomes the easier to manage when you have as many season passes as I do.

Yes it's a huge downer. I don't use kmttg for its original intent of downloading/encoding anymore. The RPC functionality revived my interest in the project however and I use it daily for managing TiVos at home and away from home. I don't care what is in next release it's going to be a huge step down in functionality for me and is killing any interest on further development with kmttg and TiVo in general. I doubt the so-called new SDK will be made available to non-commercial developers any time soon (I did sign up for it FWIW). Only hope is if someone can crack the "cdata.p12" password file that is part of the current iOS releases. I gave that a try already a few weeks back but it looks like password is a strong password which cannot be broken in any reasonable amount of time using brute force techniques. Really down on TiVo right now.

[ferrumpneuma]

Originally Posted by moyekj

FYI I received confirmation from someone involved in TiVo beta that the next software release for US Series 4 platforms indeed does indeed kill the remote control functionality because of this tightened authentication. So unless someone can crack the password for the "cdata.p12" file that entire functionality is gone from kmttg starting with next software update. It really pi**** me off as this was the most useful capability to come our way in a long time only to get yanked away. Don't really understand the motivation given the TiVo official applications are free anyway but IMO they are very limited in functionality.
May be time to figure out how to block software updates...

I'm only familiar with the basic concept and could not set it up myself.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

BOINC is an open source distributed computing platform. There is already a public rainbow table generator project. That might help someone who knows what they are doing with such things. Maybe TiVo used a password length that is not within reach of a desktop brute force attempt but short enough to guess with some giant rainbow tables or a private distributed network of desktops attempting the brute force.

http://www.freerainbowtables.com/ <-------------link to project

If you set up a project to crack "cdata.p12" my CPU/GPU cycles are yours.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by ferrumpneuma

I'm only familiar with the basic concept and could not set it up myself.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

BOINC is an open source distributed computing platform. There is already a public rainbow table generator project. That might help someone who knows what they are doing with such things. Maybe TiVo used a password length that is not within reach of a desktop brute force attempt but short enough to guess with some giant rainbow tables or a private distributed network of desktops attempting the brute force.

http://www.freerainbowtables.com/ <-------------link to project

If you set up a project to crack "cdata.p12" my CPU/GPU cycles are yours.

pkcs12 cracking program can be found here (supports brute force and dictionary attacks):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/crac...urce=directory
cdata.p12 file I attach with this post in cdata.zip file.
I tried dictionary attacks already without success and on an 8-thread CPU tried brute force but it only got up to 7 characters after a few days of work so would probably take a very long time to crack a long and strong password.

[DougD]

Does anyone know how to include the year a movie was made in the file title created by kmttg. I have four movies all named Bad Company. I would like to have kmttg put the year made in the title so I can differentiate between them. I see how to include the year I recorded it on the Tivo but not when the film was first released.

[cherry ghost]

which encode is best for HD TV shows for the new iPad?

I adjusted the ff_ipad to

FFMPEG -y -i INPUT -threads CPU_CORES -vcodec libx264 -level 31 -subq 6 -me_range 16 -qmin 10 -qmax 50 -g 300 -s 1920xHEIGHT -r 29.97 -b 4000k -maxrate 8000k -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 320k -ar 48000 -f mp4 OUTPUT

does that accomplish anything or is it a waste of time?

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by cherry ghost

which encode is best for HD TV shows for the new iPad?

I adjusted the ff_ipad to

FFMPEG -y -i INPUT -threads CPU_CORES -vcodec libx264 -level 31 -subq 6 -me_range 16 -qmin 10 -qmax 50 -g 300 -s 1920xHEIGHT -r 29.97 -b 4000k -maxrate 8000k -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 320k -ar 48000 -f mp4 OUTPUT

does that accomplish anything or is it a waste of time?

I think I saw mention somewhere that "level" should be 41 (which is really 4.1) so if it doesn't work as you have it you can try that. You can probably bump up bit rate a little I would guess but I don't know the official specs.

[cherry ghost]

Originally Posted by moyekj

I think I saw mention somewhere that "level" should be 41 (which is really 4.1) so if it doesn't work as you have it you can try that. You can probably bump up bit rate a little I would guess but I don't know the official specs.

The changes I made work, but wasn't sure if they're worth the increased file size. Stupid question: when you say bit rate, do you mean

-b 4000k -maxrate 8000k

bump those up further?

The original were

-b 2500k -maxrate 4000k

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by cherry ghost

The changes I made work, but wasn't sure if they're worth the increased file size. Stupid question: when you say bit rate, do you mean

-b 4000k -maxrate 8000k

bump those up further?

The original were

-b 2500k -maxrate 4000k

Yes.

[cherry ghost]

Originally Posted by moyekj

Yes.

Thanks!

[ncfoster]

Just for clarity's sake, there is no current indication that changes in Tivo software are going to wreck the downloading component of kmttg (or pyTivo, etc.), right? I am annoyed that they would shut off this avenue, but I don't actually use the other functionality yet.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by ncfoster

Just for clarity's sake, there is no current indication that changes in Tivo software are going to wreck the downloading component of kmttg (or pyTivo, etc.), right? I am annoyed that they would shut off this avenue, but I don't actually use the other functionality yet.

No. TiVo Desktop still needs to work the same way so that's safe.

[wmcbrine]

I'm not so sure... and I was about to elaborate, but then I thought, why give TiVo ideas? :S

[ncfoster]

Originally Posted by wmcbrine

I'm not so sure... and I was about to elaborate, but then I thought, why give TiVo ideas? :S

How ominous. Mum's the word! And if they hire you, I'm shorting Tivo.

[sanjonny]

It seems tivo info is having more episode numbers now than in the past, at least on my unit. Is there any way that for kmttg to be able to use the episode numbers in naming or show them in the Now Playing grid for the tivo?

For my tivo that runs tivowebplus, thru the web interface, it has episode numbers for most the shows, not sure how that is accomplished, but would be very helpful if kmttg could do the same or show that data easier than currently.

[Hercules67]

Originally Posted by wmcbrine

I'm not so sure... and I was about to elaborate, but then I thought, why give TiVo ideas? :S

Now you're scaring me...

I was about to buy a Series 4 unit, so I haven't used that RPC functionality yet.

I use kmttg and pyTiVo so much, I would be so disappointed to see them destroyed.

Maybe no more TiVo for me. Time to look at other options....sadly.

[lillevig]

Originally Posted by ncfoster

Just for clarity's sake, there is no current indication that changes in Tivo software are going to wreck the downloading component of kmttg (or pyTivo, etc.), right? I am annoyed that they would shut off this avenue, but I don't actually use the other functionality yet.

Time to stock up on S2 and S3 units. Tivo wouldn't dare upgrade the SW in them.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by Hercules67

Now you're scaring me...

I was about to buy a Series 4 unit, so I haven't used that RPC functionality yet.

I use kmttg and pyTiVo so much, I would be so disappointed to see them destroyed.

Maybe no more TiVo for me. Time to look at other options....sadly.

I wouldn't overreact. I think TiVo changing the core TTG/HMO functionality/authentication at this point for series 4 platforms would be highly unlikely (though not impossible).

[mattack]

Originally Posted by sanjonny

It seems tivo info is having more episode numbers now than in the past, at least on my unit. Is there any way that for kmttg to be able to use the episode numbers in naming or show them in the Now Playing grid for the tivo?

Not just episode numbers, but I realized that I couldn't download a 2 part Masterpiece Classic show, because they were both named the same. (This also happens if you manually stop recording a show then start recording it again... but this parenthetical case is less important.)

Even more than that, but the "Part 1 of 2" info isn't in the metadata file that is generated. Is this info available to the metadata generator? (It obviously shows on the tivo itself when you hit info.)

[moyekj]

If you click on an entry in kmttg NPL table if the show has episode information it will show it in the message window. Problem with trying to use episode info in file naming are numerous:
a) many episodic shows don't have the information (guide data doesn't have them)
b) obviously non-episodic shows don't have it
c) episode numbering scheme seems to be inconsistent. i.e. 122 can be season 1 episode 22 but it can also be season 12 episode 2 (which should really be 1202)
d) The HDUI for Premiere units I think uses internet data for displaying episode information so while it appears to be available the XML may not have the info readily available.

If someone wants to tackle adding support for it source code is available and a patch can be generated which I can apply and check in. At this point I'm not very enthusiastic about adding such things especially with the news about the RPC features going away with next software update which took away my enthusiasm for further development.

[BizarroTerl]

I've been using kmttg exclusively as a download method to get Tivo recordings onto my Unraid NAS for playback in XBMC. One of the biggest issues I had was that the downloaded episodes didn't have season/episode information and without that XBMC would rarely recognize them.

So I wrote a powershell script that kmttg calls as a custom command that does all that for me. It converts the file to m2ts format, runs comskip against it, then looks up the episode info from TheTvdb, renames the files, and moves it over to the NAS. For files that don't have a Thetvdb entry it will generate a nfo that Xbmc uses to import it into the XBMC library.

The script emails a results log and will suppress duplicate episodes. The initial design was to also set a limit on the number of episodes it keeps for a given series, but I haven't had time to code that.

I could make the script available, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're somewhat versed in powershell. I've been using it for a couple months now and it works well, at least for the shows I've been using it for (Tonight Show, The Office, Chuck, CSI, This Old House, BBC World News America, Parks and Rec, etc).

Thanks moyekj for providing kmttg.

[cherry ghost]

Antone ever have a Firewall problem with "Combine download and tivodecode decrypt"?



I get that every time a new download/decrypt starts and have to approve it. Doesn't happen when download and decrypt are separate.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by cherry ghost

Antone ever have a Firewall problem with "Combine download and tivodecode decrypt"?



I get that every time a new download/decrypt starts and have to approve it. Doesn't happen when download and decrypt are separate.

Makes sense since kmttg creates a temporary .bat script that is run to perform the combined download/decrypt. You can probably avoid the issue by switching to Java downloads instead.

[cherry ghost]

Originally Posted by moyekj

Makes sense since kmttg creates a temporary .bat script that is run to perform the combined download/decrypt. You can probably avoid the issue by switching to Java downloads instead.

Thanks, I'll give it a try later.


ETA - that fixed it

[Eamus Catuli]

Originally Posted by cherry ghost

which encode is best for HD TV shows for the new iPad?

Just curious - how much bigger are the files? I thinking of getting an iPad and use kmttg to make files for it. Just wondering if it's worth getting the largest storage (64 GB I think).

[cherry ghost]

Originally Posted by Eamus Catuli

Just curious - how much bigger are the files? I thinking of getting an iPad and use kmttg to make files for it. Just wondering if it's worth getting the largest storage (64 GB I think).

I made some changes to the ff_ipad encode and one hour HD shows end up around 1.5-1.6 GB.


# Description (single line, keep short)
<description>
mpeg4 container, res x=1920 h.264 video, 48KHz/320Kbps 5.1 chan aac audio

# Encode command or script (single line)
# Known keywords: FFMPEG, HANDBRAKE, MENCODER, PERL, INPUT, OUTPUT, PWD, CPU_CORES, SRTFILE
<command>
FFMPEG -y -i INPUT -threads CPU_CORES -vcodec libx264 -level 41 -subq 6 -me_range 16 -qmin 10 -qmax 50 -g 300 -s 1920xHEIGHT -r 29.97 -b 5000k -maxrate 10000k -acodec aac -ac 6 -ab 320k -ar 48000 -f mp4 OUTPUT

# Encoded output file extension
<extension>
mp4

[herbman]

For the new iPad someone should be using high profile h.264 options like CABAC and the like. Modern ffmpeg should let you specify --profile high to cover a lot of those tiny options automatically.

[Phantom Gremlin]

Originally Posted by lillevig

Time to stock up on S2 and S3 units. Tivo wouldn't dare upgrade the SW in them.

If you want to be safe, stock up on S1 units. TiVo can't upgrade the SW in them because they lost the source code. Or that's what it appears happened if you read between the lines in the S1 DST change fiasco.

I suppose it's a minor nit that the S1 doesn't even do HD or MRV or anything like that. So, other than DST algorithm changes, there wouldn't be much reason to update the SW in the S1.

[todd_j_derr]

Hi, I just started using kmttg and it works great aside from one problem I'm having which is that the audio is somewhat distorted.

I haven't seen any other reports about this which surprises me because it sounds very obvious to me, speech is often (but not continuously) distorted, especially on the first syllable of words. I might suspect the bitrate was too low, it sounds a bit like that, but I'm using the stock ff_ipad profile - 2 ch. AAC 160kbit, 48KHz.

I don't think it's distorted in the sense that it's clipping - in fact the audio level is really low compared to the source. The issue is quite obvious both on my tablet (which is actually a xoom, but I didn't like the ff_xoom profile) and on my PC. If I a/b between the mp4 and the mpg produced earlier in the pipeline it's clear the issue is present in former and not the latter. I've tried 4 shows and they all have the problem, and I can reproduce it by running the ffmpeg command myself so it seems like a ffmpeg issue and not anything else in the pipeline. I can try to produce some short clips if someone wants to listen.

I'm using kmttg 0p8q and the ffmpeg from the kmttg_win32_tools_v0p8p (which is a rather old version), on win7 x64. Any suggestions? Is anyone else having this issue? I think I'll try a newer version of ffmpeg, and play around with the flags a bit.

[moyekj]

Yes the issue is not new. The ffmpeg "aac" codec is pretty awful. Previously ffmpeg was using "libfaac" which was much better but they had to drop it because of some open source violations. Don't know if newer versions of ffmpeg are any better or not but the problem is or was related to the aac codec ffmpeg is using. If you search this thread for libfaac you will find some discussion about it.

[todd_j_derr]

Thanks, that is definitely helpful! I am re-encoding something now with the latest ffmpeg to see if it helps, but if not it looks like it's possible to get libfaac working with a bit of effort.