iTiVo (TiVo -> mac -> iPhone)

[Fofer]

Originally Posted by Yoav

One thing I would check is that it's reporting almost 750G at the top under 'used'. If it isn't, then click on the number and edit it to be 750. (There is no way for me to know how big the HD is, so either you set it, or else you turn on suggestions and let the hard drive fill.. it will remember how much got used).

Your 'wiggle' room is the gray piece of the pie. Then the 'expired' should be deleted when needed, then expiring soon, etc...

Originally Posted by AquaX

A drive advertised as 750GB has 698GB of usable space.

Thanks guys. I edited it to say 698 and now this is what I get:



I still don't have a real handle on just how much free space that gray slice equates to (ie: in terms of real world recording) but at least I know I have "some" wiggle room, I suppose.

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by Fofer

Thanks guys. I edited it to say 698 and now this is what I get:



I still don't have a real handle on just how much free space that gray slice equates to (ie: in terms of real world recording) but at least I know I have "some" wiggle room, I suppose.

Here is what you can surmise:

You are using up 'approximately' 632G of hard drive space for your shows (tivo does a lot of weird rounding). You claim your hard drive is 698G. The tivo uses up some <unknown> amount of space for its own data.. lets pretend that's 20G.

So you have about 40G unused space on your hard drive.

Assuming all your shows in the future take up around 2G per hour (yeah another number I made up), you can now be *SURE* that you have 20 hours of free space left (sarcasm intentional).

Sadly, there's no useful metric other than approximation for how much real space you have left. The pie chart should give you a 'feel' of about how much you have left, and that's intentional -- it's very very approximate. There are a lot of variables, including the bitrate of the show (determined by your cable company for digital channels, determined by you for analogue). How much *actual* space we have free (no way to ask the tivo that), and how much space will be freed as you record.

[Fofer]

Gotcha, and thanks.

The top line, with the user editable space, should say "Total Capacity" and not "Used," IMHO. (That's what was confusing me a bit, I think.)

Also, can you tell me how you arrived at the "approximately 632G" number in your post above? In other words, what line items are you looking at and/or adding up to arrive at 632?

With that said, perhaps there could be another line item that says: "total used*" so users don't need to do the math in their heads.

I'd even go so far as to say, I'd appreciate another line item that says "total free*" that was the mathematical result of 698 (my entered HD capacity) minus the number above, minus 20G (pretend number for TiVo's own data.)

*approximate

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by Fofer

Gotcha, and thanks.

The top line, with the user editable space, should say "Total Capacity" and not "Used," IMHO. (That's what was confusing me a bit, I think.)

Also, can you tell me how you arrived at the "approximately 632G" number in your post above? In other words, what line items are you looking at and/or adding up to arrive at 632?

With that said, perhaps there could be another line item that says: "total used*" so users don't need to do the math in their heads.

I'd even go so far as to say, I'd appreciate another line item that says "total free*" that was the mathematical result of 698 (my entered HD capacity) minus the number above, minus 20G (pretend number for TiVo's own data.)

*approximate

Ok, I'm fearful that people will actually *use* those numbers and believe them. They really are complete estimates. The "Used" field is just 'largest sum of all the show sizes I have seen so far", and the gray area is simply "whatever is left if you change that sum to another value.

Which is why I'm trying to avoid the word 'capacity', which most people will assume to mean 'hard drive space on the tivo' (to which I will then get 50 bug reports as to how it's not the correct value).

I guess I need a word for that which is neither 'capacity' nor 'used' but I can't think of one ...

Honestly, iTiVo is *not* the tool to use if you really want to know how much hard drive space you have free. Use that drawer to get a 'general feel' for how close to full your tivo is....

[Fofer]

I see. Interesting situation.

Well, even a "total" line item at the bottom of that list would help my brain out. Even just a tiny bit. And it'd be nice if I had the option to omit the "Suggestions" from that total (as a user configurable preference) since I kinda consider those in the same vein as deleted shows (ie: not taking up "real" space.)

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by Fofer

I see. Interesting situation.

Well, even a "total" line item at the bottom of that list would help my brain out. Even just a tiny bit. And it'd be nice if I had the option to omit the "Suggestions" from that total (as a user configurable preference) since I kinda consider those in the same vein as deleted shows (ie: not taking up "real" space.)

Ok. I'll add a Total and a 'wiggle'.. although should wiggle just include unallocated and suggestions? or should it also include 'expired'?

[Fofer]

I think just unallocated and suggestions. As far as the way I've seen nearly every TiVo being used and enjoyed, folks have plenty of "expired" shows that they fully intend to watch. Hence the reason for the "free space anxiety" in the first place.

[smoknyreyz]

Sorry if this has already been posted, I searched the thread and didn't see it. When using visual hub for dvd conversion there is a preset for Apple TV 5.1 to get dolby digital audio. It seems my conversions with this software using the Apple TV preset are only stereo. What settings should I use to get dolby digital 5.1 from my HD conversions for Apple TV?

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by smoknyreyz

Sorry if this has already been posted, I searched the thread and didn't see it. When using visual hub for dvd conversion there is a preset for Apple TV 5.1 to get dolby digital audio. It seems my conversions with this software using the Apple TV preset are only stereo. What settings should I use to get dolby digital 5.1 from my HD conversions for Apple TV?

Visual Hub for AppleTV?
I'm pretty sure you're posting in the wrong thread... (I don't know anything about visual hub, although someone may chime in).

If you mean handbrake.. You may want to ask on the handbrake forums.. If I recall correctly appleTVs are kind of dumb and only support prologic instead of discrete (although that may have been changed).

[smoknyreyz]

Originally Posted by Yoav

Visual Hub for AppleTV?
I'm pretty sure you're posting in the wrong thread... (I don't know anything about visual hub, although someone may chime in).

If you mean handbrake.. You may want to ask on the handbrake forums.. If I recall correctly appleTVs are kind of dumb and only support prologic instead of discrete (although that may have been changed).

Visual Hub is another conversion utility for the mac, it's much like handbrake. Apple TV's do support 5.1 dolby digital audio after the Apple TV 2.0 update. I searched through another forum last night (not the tivo community forum) and discovered that the new version of handbrake allows ac3 passthrough which works with the preset apple tv setting, so it looks like using the newly implemented handbrake apple tv preset in your software will allow 5.1. I will download the new version of your software and try it. I'll let you know my results.

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by smoknyreyz

Visual Hub is another conversion utility for the mac, it's much like handbrake. Apple TV's do support 5.1 dolby digital audio after the Apple TV 2.0 update. I searched through another forum last night (not the tivo community forum) and discovered that the new version of handbrake allows ac3 passthrough which works with the preset apple tv setting, so it looks like using the newly implemented handbrake apple tv preset in your software will allow 5.1. I will download the new version of your software and try it. I'll let you know my results.

Thank you
If you figure out some changes that are needed under advanced settings to get AppleTV to work, tell me and I'll add them. Just please make sure that they work for regular and HD programming (yes I have no AppleTV to test with, so relying on people who do to tell me how to make them work).

[wdave]

This is a great app, Yoav, thanks for doing this.

My converted videos end up with some severe color artifacts and blockiness. Is this a known issue with a known remedy?

[Yoav]

Ok just pushed 1.7b1 in there.
features added:
AtomicParsley in bundle
Putting shows in subdirs (based on show name).
Generating metadata (AP, xml and .txt for pytivo)
Program won't exit when window is closed..

The metadata is just basic stuff (showname, episode title, etc). If you want to put in more complete metadata I recommend tools such as MetaX

I have a nagging feeling I broke stuff in the process.. oh well. That's why I make beta builds first...

[smoknyreyz]

Has anyone tried the Handbrake Apple TV preset? The converted file plays fine in itunes, but it doesn't even show up on my apple tv even after a sync. I can convert with the standard apple tv setting, not using the handbrake option, but that doesn't give me 5.1 audio.

[Cuisinartoh]

I'm a new user of iTivo starting today. It solves the problem of me having to manually download Oprah with TDM, convert video to iPhone, copy to wife's iTunes library, and then sync to her iPhone so she can watch Oprah at lunch. Dude, how do I send you money?

You should accept/solicit donations so you can buy an ElGato Turbo.264 and/or an Apple TV

Thanks for the app,
Ed Jones

[smoknyreyz]

Originally Posted by smoknyreyz

Has anyone tried the Handbrake Apple TV preset? The converted file plays fine in itunes, but it doesn't even show up on my apple tv even after a sync. I can convert with the standard apple tv setting, not using the handbrake option, but that doesn't give me 5.1 audio.

Looks like 1.7b2 fixed whatever was causing the problem. I've now been able to use the handbrake apple tv preset to convert for apple tv and retain the 5.1 soundtrack. Thanks for the great software!

[wdave]

Originally Posted by fatespawn

Yoav,

On my G5 10.4 mac, I am still having difficulty encoding to .mp4. I have "iphone" and edit commercials selected. The download is successful, and the comskip seems successful, but when the encoding phase begins, everything bogs down. It's reporting 180+ minutes remaining. My G5 may be yesterday's Mac, but it's not THAT slow. Here's a sample of the output file iTivo is giving me.



Not very pretty. I'll try some other presets - disabling comskip etc. and see if anything changes. I don't have a log file because I couldn't wait the 3 hours for the total encode.

Originally Posted by wdave

My converted videos end up with some severe color artifacts and blockiness. Is this a known issue with a known remedy?

Mine looked just like fatespawn's above screenshot. I fixed it by reinstalling the latest mencoder Binary Codec Package (scroll down to the codec packages on that page).

Originally Posted by cmontyburns

H.264 encoding on PPC hardware takes forever, unfortunately.

Indeed. I started the same 2:30 HD movie download/conversion (to iPhone) with each of my Macs:

G5 Dual 2.3GHz PPC: 67 hours est
New MBP 2.4GHz Duo: 2.5 hours est

[Yoav]

Mine looked just like fatespawn's above screenshot. I fixed it by reinstalling the latest mencoder Binary Codec Package (scroll down to the codec packages on that page).

So, I'm a little confused as to why a codec package would help (since the encoder takes mpeg-2 as input and spits out h.264 mp4, both of which *should* be in the mencoder binary). However, if that works for you yay...

H.264 encoding on PPC hardware takes forever, unfortunately.

Yeah ppc is slow, and h.264 is REALLY cpu-intensive. However, it's possible that there are some useful compile-time flags that could be passed in when compiling the ppc version of libx264 to help speed it up a little. However, I don't know of any relevant ones. If you think of a good way to improve it, I'd be happy to do so.

HOWEVER, an additional thing that *will* speed it along greatly: select iphone. Go into the advanced menu, and edit the video encoder options. Delete it all, and replace it with this:

-of lavf -lavfopts format=ipod -ovc x264 -x264encopts nocabac:subq=1:level_idc=30:me=dia:bitrate=256:threads=auto:bframes=0:keyint=15:global_header -vf dsize=480:320:0,scale=-8:-8,harddup

This should yield a considerably 'uglier' encode, but hopefully considerably faster too. You may want to read up on encoder settings on http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en...feat-x264.html or http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/x264Options

[Yoav]

Looks like 1.7b2 fixed whatever was causing the problem. I've now been able to use the handbrake apple tv preset to convert for apple tv and retain the 5.1 soundtrack. Thanks for the great software!

Which is incredibly odd since I didn't touch the encoder settings for AppleTV in any 1.7 release .. hmmm... Well yay it's working... black magic!

[Yoav]

Thanks for the app,
Ed Jones

You're welcome. And no donations necessary. Feel free to give what you'd have donated to a charity you like instead.. (I'm not fond of taking donations for this since (1) it's based on someone else's code, (2) I did it mostly for me, (3) I'd feel obligated to fix bugs once I started taking cash .

[Fofer]

You're a kind and generous man, Yoav. Thanks for sharing this work and your time here too.

[fatespawn]

wdave and Yoav,

Somthing must be goofy with the PPC encoding scheme. I don't know the correct "phraseology" but 67hours for an encode and the wierd "LSD effect" of the mp4's seem to be related somehow.

I posted on the last page some results from using Visualhub to encode with my 1.5 Ghz G4, my 2.0Ghz dual G5, and my 2.4Ghz dual iMac. Each is about 3 times slower than the next for a 30 minute SD video.... (180 min for the G4, 60 min for the G5 and 20 minutes for the imac)

Those numbers seem pretty consistent, but 67 HOURS?! That's a bit on the peculiar side of things. I wish I could help more - or I may be forced to go out and just bite the bullet and buy a new Mac Pro for myself

-fate

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by fatespawn

Those numbers seem pretty consistent, but 67 HOURS?! That's a bit on the peculiar side of things. I wish I could help more - or I may be forced to go out and just bite the bullet and buy a new Mac Pro for myself

-fate

I'm curious. How does the Handbrake/iPhone setting compare? It's certainly possible that the build I have for mencoder is simply badly optimized for ppc (although that wouldn't explain the color strangeness) -- or worse, buggy on the ppc side -- cross compiling is a bitch and can lead to weirdnesses.
The handbrake binary is straight from their website. If you're getting *significantly* better performance using it, then my mencoder build is probably busted.
If you're not, then I would guess that libx264 is just not very ppc-friendly, and that visualhub used a different encoder for their h.264... If it's possible to drive that encoder from the commandline or via applescript, it might be possible to get iTivo to use it....

One other tiny thing: is visual-hub built universal? or are you running it via rosetta on i386?

[fatespawn]

i'll try the handbrake setting when I get home in a few days. I too am curious as to it's performance.

alas, VisualHub was a nice little universal app that seemed to be my "one-stop-shop" for video conversion. I was formerly a ffmpegx devotee, but a lack of development and a rather ~dark~ h264 output led me to VisualHub. Unfortunately, Visualhub is no longer being supported or developed. Too bad. It is still a good app.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21888

-fate

[cuyahoga]

Originally Posted by Yoav

Hey thanks! (As you can tell i've been busy trying to get 10.4 working and completely dropped the ball on ElGato).

I was hoping that the elgato encoder defaulted to 'last value used' for the setting, so that you can run it manually, change the settings, and then let iTiVo do its thing.
There *IS* a way to force it to encode with particular resolution choices (it has to be one of 'ipod high, ipod standard, sony psp, appletv, iphone' when you invoke the encoder). I just didn't want to create another 5 download formats to support each individually....

Can you tell me if it saves the last format used? Would it help if I left the application running after the encode is done?

I'm not sure about the metadata though. I have no clue what turbo.264 does with it

It does seem to remember last format used, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I drag and drop the file in and iTiVo sends the file to turbo.264 in a different way.

[cuyahoga]

Originally Posted by Yoav

Ok just checked in a change that will let you specify in advanced options (under video encoder) one of
ipodH , ipod, psp, appleTV, iPhone
and if none are specified, it will default to using whatever the program already has.

Also, re-enabling comskip since we can use the same hack we're using for handbrake.

Ok, I saw this message after I posted my pervious message.

I downloaded 1.7b2 and tried using the elgato turbo.264 iPhone preset.

Once the file is downloaded with iTiVo, it doesn't seem to be handing off to the elgato encoder.

Turbo.264 software doesn't load.

Ideas?

As always, thanks for your work on this.

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by cuyahoga

Ok, I saw this message after I posted my pervious message.

I downloaded 1.7b2 and tried using the elgato turbo.264 iPhone preset.

Once the file is downloaded with iTiVo, it doesn't seem to be handing off to the elgato encoder.

Turbo.264 software doesn't load.

Ideas?

As always, thanks for your work on this.

Ideas? well if it doesn't even try running the encoder that's something I should be able to reproduce, so let me try it... I may have broken something...

Update: yeah I did break something. My entirely bad. One little space is all the difference .

Ok try 1.7b3, which should have that part fixed (it should at least launch the elgato encoder.. whether it works is a different question).

[fatespawn]

Originally Posted by Yoav

I'm curious. How does the Handbrake/iPhone setting compare? It's certainly possible that the build I have for mencoder is simply badly optimized for ppc (although that wouldn't explain the color strangeness) -- or worse, buggy on the ppc side -- cross compiling is a bitch and can lead to weirdnesses.
The handbrake binary is straight from their website. If you're getting *significantly* better performance using it, then my mencoder build is probably busted.
If you're not, then I would guess that libx264 is just not very ppc-friendly, and that visualhub used a different encoder for their h.264... If it's possible to drive that encoder from the commandline or via applescript, it might be possible to get iTivo to use it....

One other tiny thing: is visual-hub built universal? or are you running it via rosetta on i386?

Ugh... The Handbrake is for 10.5. I'm running a G5 PPC 10.4. The encode fails without even producing a file.

I tried wdave's suggestion of updating the codec's, but that was no luck either. Same colorization effect and EXTREMELY long encodes. The most recent SD video file I encoded "completed" successfully, with the strange colorization still there.

Here is a the result:



This file took 2:40 to finish using iTivo's iPhone preset.

Then I did the decrypt only and used VisualHub and ffmpegX:
With VisualHub it took 43 minutes
With ffmpegX it took 32 minutes

This was a 30 minute SD video. The mencoder build MUST be screwed up if there's that much difference in encoding schemes. Both Visual Hub and ffmpegx's settings were about the same at iphone resolution at 1000-1100 kbps bitrates.

Any ideas?

[Yoav]

Originally Posted by fatespawn

Ugh... The Handbrake is for 10.5. I'm running a G5 PPC 10.4. The encode fails without even producing a file.

Oh right.. handbrake is 10.5 only

Ooh, I found one place where the compiler tries to run uname -m to add some compiler flags.. let me cheat that and see if we get a build that works this time... <Crossing fingers>.

If not, the last option is to have someone who has xcode installed on a PPC machine build it for me... (volunteers?)

UPDATE: Ok I just built 1.7b5 with the new ppc flags. Can you tell me if this seems to fix it?

[fatespawn]

YEA! Success - mostly.

Ok, I got things to work on my 10.4 PPC - albeit a bit on the "slow side." 1 GREAT thing though - no color ghosting.

Everything works as advertised on the SD video I tested this morning. It was a 30 minute clip encoded with the iphone preset and comskip enabled.

The encoding process IS still slow though - but not NEARLY as painful as 3 hours.

It took me 50 minutes to encode a 17 minute (the 30 minute show after comskip) to the iPhone format.

That's still about 1/2 as fast as Visualhub and even slower than ffmpegX - not that I'm passing any blame here.... I just wonder if there is anything we can to to speed up the process?