Automatic free space indicator

[nsysblh]

Here is a little free space indicator I wrote. It should work on Series 1 with software version >= 3.

Instructions are included, as well as an explanation of the osd output.

The automatic part is that is puts up the information in place of the header on the Now Showing (or Now Playing) screen automatically.

Anyway, have fun with it.

Brandon

[nsysblh]

This is now V1.1. This will work with UK and US TiVos. See CHANGES.txt

If you installed V1.0 (or V1.0a) previously, don't forget to replace the osdcons executable. Then make sure to kill the old osdcons and autospace before starting autospace.tcl

Thanks to sanderton for help with the UK changes.

The osdcons package is somewhere on the second page of the thread.


NOTE: Until I update the included readme, there have been reported issues with the daily call using the rc.sysinit documented in the included readme.

The following format is suggested for the startup line in rc.sysinit:

/<directory>/autospace.tcl start >/dev/null 2>&1 &

(Note the trailing & that is not in the included readme)

[pahunt]

This sounds great but will it definitely not work on a UK Tivo with 2.5.5 or have you just not been able to test it on older software than version 3?

[nsysblh]

As is, it won't work with UK tivos. The data is in a different place in versions < 3.

[cachecard_user]

all i have is a readme file and a version file

looks cool though, i would like to try it

[SR712]

Very Nice, nsysblh, good job. Pretty handy. Works great. The only thing I can suggest, would be to use a san-serif font like the TiVo uses... it would blend into the normal TiVo-skin and look more like it belonged.

[cachecard_user]

[edit] Nevermind. For some reason windows won't show the files in any window or view, but my FTP client sees the files and they uploaded!

Looks GREAT!

(my only complaint is that the TiVo guy in the upper left hand corner is covered up)

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
when I unzip the file, i only get the readme and the version files, where did you get the actual files?

[tombo28]

Cool idea.
I get the following error when I try to run it:

bash-2.02# ./autospace
No EventSwitcher active
    while executing
"event register $TmkEventII::EVT_USREVENT  EventCallback"
    (file "./autospace" line 161)

The same error appears when I try it with -start and -status.
In case it helps, I'm running an SVR-2000 with v.3.01.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[tombo28]

Nevermind, a reboot fixed it.
Thanks again for a cool app.

[route66]

Worked great for me. I second the font change request.

[nsysblh]

Hmm. the font is from elseed (and tivovbi). apparently it was the only one that fit nicely. It also has the full PC character set...which is nice for line drawing.

If anyone knows of another fixed 16w x 26h font, let me know. Everything I have found is not a good aspect ratio. Since it is using fixed character spaces, it has to be a fixed size bitmap type font (not trutype or anything pcish)

I'll keep looking for a new font. I guess I could design my own. The font is the only thing I didn't rewrite myself.

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As far as the EventSwitcher error, for some reason Version 3 has an eventswitcher bug and it does go out to lunch more and more as you run tcl scripts which attach to the EventSwitcher. A reboot will fix it.

My suggestion here is to reboot and run the program once. It will attach to the EventSwitcher only twice at startup (once for the foreground and once for the background) and then stay stable. If you restart or exit and start a lot, it will eventually kill the EventSwitcher (I know from testing). If that happens, a reboot will fix it.

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The Tivo Guy isn't really covered. You can see thru the background. He is telling you how much space is being used (or something). I tried a transparent background, and the letters are harder to read...the palette on that screen only has about 10 unique colors to choose from (as opposed to the playback screen which has the full 256 and they are all different)

Brandon

[km]

I would like to request one more number in the display. The number of hours at the machines default recording quality attributed to Suggestions + Free/Deleted Space.

In other words the number of hours to the right of the yellow region in the bar.

[sanderton]

Originally posted by nsysblh
As is, it won't work with UK tivos. The data is in a different place in versions < 3.

Easy enough to change to work with 2.5.5. Might have a play later.

[nsysblh]

Originally posted by sanderton
Easy enough to change to work with 2.5.5. Might have a play later.

Feel free. It is fairly straightforward, I just didn't want to put out something with a totally untested code section.

Originally posted by km
I would like to request one more number in the display. The number of hours at the machines default recording quality attributed to Suggestions + Free/Deleted Space.

In other words the number of hours to the right of the yellow region in the bar.

I wanted to stay away from hour calculations, as they are more prone to error than anything else. However, adding an hour remaining counter may be a nice thing. You want it to just overlay the recording indicators on the right side if they exist? There are only 4 character positions to play with, so it would have to be a number kinda just floating in space. I think the most "recordings" that can be taking place at 1 time on a directivo is 3, so I used the last 3 positions for the recording indicators (it is left as an exercise to the reader as to how to record 3 things at once :-)

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Just to point out, because it is buried in the doc, and not obvious, the numbers on the upper right are show counters, not hour counters...[1 2 3] would mean one permanent show, two normal, and 3 suggestions.

If I could only find a drastically smaller font that was still readable, I could fit more than 36cols and 2 rows in the space available...and add more info.

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Is the timing ok? I know it takes a while to populate on a machine w/o a working cachecard. Sometimes I think the 30 minute timeout is too long. What I wanted to avoid is recalculating every time you navigate to anywhere besides Now Showing.

Does anyone care that the deleted shows and pure free space are lumped together for display. I tried it both ways, and decided using a real color for deleted shows was too confusing. Especially since there is no space to fit the count of deleted shows on the screen.

Brandon

[hopefulboydy]

I installed the app on a tivo with a working cachecard and it works great. I dont really think you need to add anything else as showing the memory available as a percentage of total memory is more meaningful that hours remaining (hours remaining is all dependent on what resolution/bitrates you record with etc). When I enter Now Showing and the app kicks in, it takes a a few seconds, maybe more than 5 seconds to display the info. Is there anyway to speed this up ?

[spinJR]

does this work with the DirectTV HDVRs? (HDVR and DSR7000)

[nsysblh]

Originally posted by spinJR
does this work with the DirectTV HDVRs? (HDVR and DSR7000)

Not Series 2. No one has figured out the Series 2 osd chip at the same level as the series 1 osd. All I know of at the moment is that you can rewrite the entire screen on a Series 2 via osdwriter. That would defeat the purpose of keeping the existing data on the screen.

Originally posted by hopefulboydy
When I enter Now Showing and the app kicks in, it takes a a few seconds, maybe more than 5 seconds to display the info. Is there anyway to speed this up ?

How many total entries do you have? I have a 160G disk with ~250 now showing entries on one dsr6000+cachecard and it usually takes about 2 secs. Does it print 3 dots as in: 'Getting Data...' and then pause? The last step is to plow thru all the recordings. That part is going to take awhile no matter how it gets done.

It used to be slower. I optimized it a bit before releasing it. This is probably as fast as tcl can read the info.

Brandon

[hopefulboydy]

nsysblh, I only have about 30 recordings on there at the minute - 80G + 80G Series 1 SA Philips. It does say Getting Data ... while its retrieving the info. I suppose, it may actually not take as much as 5 secs.......just me being impatient. I am not at home now so i cant check, but it did seem to take a while last night. I suppose I will have to learn to be patient :-) Thanks for the great app.

[HTH]

Can you make it appear on the To Do List as well, and update the value as the cursor moves forward through the list for how much space will be available at those future times?

[sanderton]

Tweaked it to work on UK 2.5.5. The enc. version is ONLY UK compatible.

nsysblh, you should be able to see the very few changes with a compare; if you only want one version floating around TiVoWeb has code in it for identifying UK machines.

The filenames you have chosen are identified by WinXP as being system files, and so are hidden when you unzip them, which might cause some confusion!

Very nice work; it looks really good (I think I might move the % free number from over the top of the little TiVo though; my kids like him!)

[SR712]

Originally posted by nsysblh
Hmm. the font is from elseed (and tivovbi). apparently it was the only one that fit nicely. It also has the full PC character set...which is nice for line drawing.

If anyone knows of another fixed 16w x 26h font, let me know.

Do you have this font in a file by itself? It's compiled into your proggy, right? I could work on it if I had it in a recognized format.

[WTF]

Very nice. Thanks nsysblh!

[cojonesdetoro]

Very nice indeed. I would like to offer a humble suggestion. It would be nice to have cmdline flags to indicate if you want:

- just percent number (tivo guy not covered)
- yes/no graph (short version)

I modified it for myself to just show percent disk used away from the tivo guy on one line but I think it may be nice as a cmdline option.

Thanks for the great script. Now I don't need to rely on tivoweb to tell me how much space is left.

[nsysblh]

SR712: Here is the osdcons pacakge. It is really a .gz file, so rename to:

osdcons.tar.gz

and the font file is there too. I'm not locked in to a 26x16 font. That just seems to be big enough to be nicely readable. Something like 20x12 would probably work fine also. The osdcons code may or may not handle a width that isn't a multiple of 8, but I am willing to fix it so it will if someone comes up with a smaller bit-mapped font. Any normal font support is out of my capability, though. And since it has to be compiled into the code, I doubt there are any public domain or gpled normal fonts anyhow. I'm sure they are all copyrighted my adobe or M$ or apple or whoever.

This has been updated to osdcons V1.1A to support autospace V1.1

[nsysblh]

Originally posted by cojonesdetoro
Very nice indeed. I would like to offer a humble suggestion. It would be nice to have cmdline flags to indicate if you want:

- just percent number (tivo guy not covered)
- yes/no graph (short version)

I modified it for myself to just show percent disk used away from the tivo guy on one line but I think it may be nice as a cmdline option.

Thanks for the great script. Now I don't need to rely on tivoweb to tell me how much space is left.

Looks like covering the TiVo guy is a big no-no, so the next version will at least have to have an option on that.

What is a 'yes/no' graph?

Tivoweb does an excellent job. I need to put a 'credits' file in the next version too thanking the Tivoweb people / project. It is on the thorough side. It actually tries to calculate hour values for everything. That takes a while. I looked at their code and decided it was best for me to just write the data collection routines from scratch. tivosh and dumpobj are a good way to learn the database structure. The entirety of autospace is extremely straightforward. I'm not sure why no one wrote this before. Maybe osdcons makes it easier. I know I wouldn't have done it without a generic osd writer program.

Brandon

[bobnick]

Thanks for a great utility, and a big thumbs up to Stuart for his version too.
It complained about reading osdcons the first time it was run (after a chmod 755) - i changed the rights to 777 and ran it again successfully - not sure if it was setting files up the first time or whether it was a rights based thing - but I'm very happy now!

I too would like to be able to see Mr Tivo, and a swisher font would be nice (if we're allowed to be this fussy!)

The request regarding the graph was to have a command line switch as to whether or not to show the graph, I presume. I just hope you weren't being sarcastic in your reply, in case your sense of humour is more British than the Brit's!

[nsysblh]

Originally posted by bobnick
Thanks for a great utility, and a big thumbs up to Stuart for his version too.
It complained about reading osdcons the first time it was run (after a chmod 755) - i changed the rights to 777 and ran it again successfully - not sure if it was setting files up the first time or whether it was a rights based thing - but I'm very happy now!

I too would like to be able to see Mr Tivo, and a swisher font would be nice (if we're allowed to be this fussy!)

The request regarding the graph was to have a command line switch as to whether or not to show the graph, I presume. I just hope you weren't being sarcastic in your reply, in case your sense of humour is more British than the Brit's!

I have no sense of sarcasm that I am aware of...and I don't think I'm british (although I keep wanting to type presentationbehaviour and colour in the code...I like the concept of adding extra 'u's near the end of words)

Oh, yes/no to put the graph up or not I thought maybe there was some weird kind of graph that would only plot yes or no if there were certain types of shows. Isn't the graph the whole point of the program?

So, you just want the top line and a blank bottom line? Or should the show counts move around based on whether there is a graph or not. If the graph were gone, tivo guy could be set free. I could probably fit precentages as well as show counts...is that kinda what you want? A non-graphical rendition.

Brandon

[sanderton]

Everyone will have their own preference I suspect! For me, I'd have just the graph with the xx% free in text where the file numbers now - nothing else.

For perfection, I'd like it togglable from the remote.

[mrtickle]

This is superb! Thanks nsysblh, and sanderton for the tweaks for 2.5. Now that it is working for me I can read the comments about positions of things and they make sense

Do you intend to merge the UK code into the main code, it would be cool if you could before there are too many changes.

As for layout, here are my opinions - there is a blank line at the top of the screen, could this be used? (hmm. Perhaps there is less room at the top on the NTSC version of Now Playing, so it's probably better not to so that there are fewer differences!)

The "% used" text could go actually on the graph itself, perhaps semi-transparent so that the colour underneath shows through? It could be centred under the total number of recordings, or at the end of the yellow bar, or to the right of the yellow bar. This way nothing would cover Mr. TiVo but we'd still get the info. You'd only need to display the number eg "65%".


Any reason cyan was used and not green? Ah, could it be a clash with the background colour of your Now Playing? The UK's background is blue. I was thinking it would be good if the permanent part of the graph and value at the top could be green, because the blobs next to their recordings are green as well.

Am I right in assuming you get the sizes of finished recordings direct from the tivo - so those of us with hacked bitrates will still have our own values being used?

At the moment it says "65% used" at the top of Now Playing (just refreshed) but tivoweb's info module says 66.8%.

Anyway those are minor - this is one hack I'm definitely going to keep

[nsysblh]

Originally posted by sanderton
Everyone will have their own preference I suspect! For me, I'd have just the graph with the xx% free in text where the file numbers now - nothing else.

For perfection, I'd like it togglable from the remote.

I'd love to add remote functionality. I've tested it. Here is the issue: Once you start receiving remote events, you receive all of them and there is no way to turn them off. There is some overhead to receive key-presses no matter where you are in the system. Maybe a command option to turn on remote control...for low overhead, disable it.

Now that I think of it, I kinda like it. You could have all sorts of options from the remote, even restarting the program with the remote disabled.

Now the bigger question, what keys are "safe" on that screen? I think Record is safe. 1, 2 and 3 aren't, as they resort the list. I think 5-9 and 0 are. I'll play around later and maybe try to figure out what can be used.

Originally posted by mrtickle
Do you intend to merge the UK code into the main code, it would be cool if you could before there are too many changes.

As for layout, here are my opinions - there is a blank line at the top of the screen, could this be used? (hmm. Perhaps there is less room at the top on the NTSC version of Now Playing, so it's probably better not to so that there are fewer differences!)

The "% used" text could go actually on the graph itself, perhaps semi-transparent so that the colour underneath shows through? It could be centred under the total number of recordings, or at the end of the yellow bar, or to the right of the yellow bar. This way nothing would cover Mr. TiVo but we'd still get the info. You'd only need to display the number eg "65%".


Any reason cyan was used and not green? Ah, could it be a clash with the background colour of your Now Playing? The UK's background is blue. I was thinking it would be good if the permanent part of the graph and value at the top could be green, because the blobs next to their recordings are green as well.

Am I right in assuming you get the sizes of finished recordings direct from the tivo - so those of us with hacked bitrates will still have our own values being used?

At the moment it says "65% used" at the top of Now Playing (just refreshed) but tivoweb's info module says 66.8%.

Yes, I will get the UK code merged now that I have something that has been tested.

The blank line at the top is merely an illusion. Ok, actually it could be used if osdcons were rewritten to allow resize of some constants. I'm resizing everything else, so it should be doable. Hmm 3 lines, imagine the possibilities...

I have an overstrike mode, so overlaying the percent used in the middle of the bar graph would work ok. It would have to be the dark transparent, or black so it would contrast no matter what was below it. I'll try that out.

The StreamSize reported by MFS is what I am using. Tivoweb goes to great trouble to be completely accurate. 65 is rounded to the nearest % anyway. It could be 64.5 up to 65.49. The number was an afterthought. My original idea was to round to the nearest 4% and use only solid blocks on the bar graph. Feature creep set in, and you see the result. In my mind 65 and 66.8 are as close as I had hoped for.

There is no green in the palette for that part of the screen. Only the first 16 color positions are implemented and several of those are a weird transparent blue. I don't like the Cyan either, but I gave up trying to find the palette to reload it. I kept obliterating the text on the bottom of the screen trying to find the palette. The lower text is a fairly necessary thing :-)

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Thanks for all the compliments everybody. I'm glad it is useful. The Series 1 is a really nice platform to program on. Plus, I can test things while the family is watching tv. (why is the screen all funny colors?...oh let me clear that off)