Automatic download of all recordings?

[loganasu]

Ok... here's the situation.
My parents will be moving to China at the end of the year.
My father is looking for ways to allow my mother to watch US content while in China.
They will be keeping their place here in the US and it will have cable.

One option I thought of was to have them get a tivo and use kmttg to automatically download shows and convert them into a small file, place the encoded file on dropbox.
Then dropbox will sync with the computer in China and my mother will be able to see some of the shows that she likes.

This will work for items that are on a season pass but won't work for special shows here and there.

They will be able to get to tivo.com so they can schedule recording and season passes from there.

Is there any way to download every recording to a local PC?


or are there other options we should look at?

slingbox is not reliable from china due to bandwidth issues.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[jcthorne]

I think you are in the right track. kmttg can be set up to dl and store every new recording. you will need a large dropbox account but can work. The files are not small unless you downres and convert to h.264 and that would require significant pc processor power to do ALL recordings.

[loganasu]

The nice part is that my mother will not need time sesitive recordings. If it takes a while to transcode into a small file, it is not a problem.
My mother only requires it to be watchable on an iphone or ipad.

I believe that the goal will be for my mother to watch some programing this way.
This will not be needed for my mother to watch all of her programing that way.
Right now, I'm thinking that it will only be a couple of programs a day.

And thanks for mentioning that kmttg can download everything. I just now saw how to do that.



Are there other ways that might work the same way?

[ThAbtO]

You can try to encode using ff_ipad on KMTTG, that can shrink it down as much as possible and makes it compatible with ipad. Research in to Google Drive, buy some extra space, since you will only have 5gb free.

[loganasu]

Yeah.... I have to pull together a list of sites that will sync with computers there as well. Oh, and how much it will cost as well.

Tough being the geek of the family.

[Allanon]

Use Microsoft's Skydrive, it gives 25GB free space and you can map Skydrive as a network drive in Windows.

[AudioNutz]

I do almost this exact thing, although I have the ability to administer the thing locally.
My use case involves all of my business travel, and I'm almost never home to watch TV, but I do watch on a mobile device while traveling. (Airports, Cars, etc...)

1. I use KMTTG to download, cut commercials, and encode. (You could just use an asterisk* to get every show)
2. Then I use the "Custom" command that KMTTG has, to zip the show, scramble the name, and then place on my FTP server.

I scramble the name, because I'm on business, I don't want the name of the shows hitting any firewall log at my company if I'm downloading at the office.
I use ZIP, because if I unzip the scrambled file, it restores the original name.

If I need to administer the thing when I'm traveling, I have a way to do that by remoting into the computer. I use an Apple product, but I've seen other products like "TeamViewer" that allow many of the same remote admin/control ability.

My FTP server is just a handy server that I have, any file sharing device will do, as long as you have the ability to tunnel through your home router to get to it. My ISP uses a dynamic IP addresses, but it only changes about 2 times per year. Each time I leave the house, I confirm what the IP address is, and I'm good to go!