[Wil]

You caught me! The past 15 years I've spent on this site were just to butter you up so I could trick you into installing a hack on your PC.:smilingimp:

A perfect execution of the long con!

 

[Wil]

as soon as I have some free time I'm going to finally get this ported over to Mac as well.

You can't see this because I have black tape over my laptop camera lens and you're probably not CIA anyway, but I'm throwing you a kiss. There, one of my kids is also.

EDITED TO ADD: Well, that spoils the moment. He's asking about VideoReDo. Ingrate. I would never personally do that! I gladly keep Parallels clogging up my laptop for the SOLE PURPOSE of running VideoReDo. No problem. It's an honor to do that.

 

[Wil]

Transport streams ... could have some buffer issues.

So downloading ts has the advantage of handling captioning better, and is the ONLY choice with mpeg4 channels, but otherwise we are better off downloading ps for multi-use (back to Tivo and also for other players) archiving. Is that a fair statement?

 

[Wil]

TS also is better able to get pass transmission errors. In some cases when there is an error in the recording and you try to download as PS the transfer will just stop when it hits the error. TS can usually get past the error and transfer the whole show.

I knew it was going to be more complicated than that.

My experience (which apparently is not typical) is exactly the opposite, and that's another reason I was leaning towards shifting to ps, but I had read that theoretically what you just said was true and I hoped that was wrong.

 

[Wil]

I've run into recordings that go both ways. Ones that wont transfer as PS and ones that wont transfer as TS. In every case the other option always worked.

So you're not dissuading me from going to ps in all non-mpeg4 cases where I'm willing to forgo best odds at good captions, since if there's download failure due to transmission error I can simply re-download as ts (whereas if there's buffer-induced glitches via ts the download is "successful" and I simply don't know until years later when I play back).

 

[Wil]

You guys are correct. If TS fails it could be in the form of a glitch that you don't notice until you play the file. If PS fails it's immediate.

This has been useful. Thanks. You're inside here; maybe these digressive messages should be moved to an appropriate thread (if it exists, I don't remember such a productive discussion) or a new thread created "transport streams vs. program streams" or something, to get them out of the way of your remarkable pyTivo magnum opus.

 

[Wil]

The way it works now you essentially have to turn GateKeeper off just to install and it doesn't give you instructions on how to do that, so I worry that will deter people from using the app.

Do what you want, but from a user pov it's pretty trivial. Lots of developers don't want to sign up with Apple so any Mac user who's likely to be interested in this kind of software pretty much does the install on mental autopilot.

 

[Wil]

I'm not a Mac user so for me it seemed cumbersome.

I think I'm missing something? You hold down the control key.

 

[Wil]

...my *FIRST* printer was an old 150+ lb teletype machine; 300 baud RS-232...

At least you had RS232. My original-run Apple II did not and I had to rig a brute force connection for my first salvaged teletype. Plus write my own ascii-to-baudot code. The good old days.

 

[Wil]

One of the wonderful new features Rivo is offering is that you can't do that anymore.

At least for now it is possible to say "no thanks" and revert to a previous system with the simultaneous advantage of destroying all your old programs! You can find that by searching Hydra sucks, or probably better on Hydra downgrade.

 

[Wil]

It's a giant leap backwards. How on earth did this crap get approved?

It's to our advantage as users and we should be grateful. By degrading the user experience towards the awful norm, Rivo has made using one of those other devices less painful. With those other devices getting better and better (by a little) and Rivo getting worse (by a lot) we're moving towards a wonderful user universe of choices all about the same: much simpler world.

 

[Wil]

Nope, all wired.

I toggle my Bolts between static and hdcp when this happens every once in awhile and they pop right back. I'd like to find out why but I'm always in a hurry when it happens so I just do the voodoo.

EDIT: Actions that work on the much rarer incidents with Tivo s3s, HDs and Roamios: power cycling, quitting and re-running pyTivo, etc, usually do not work for me with the Bolts.

 

[Wil]

I'm not sure if pytivo creates a text file when you copy a show from TiVo to PC

pyTivo Desktop has a setting to create a metadata text file automatically.

 

[Wil]

Is it OK to just brute force fresh install pyTivo Desktop on a Mac by copying the entire pyTivo Application folder from a working Mac and copying the startup file to the System library? Does the installer really do anything else I need to be concerned about?

I did that and all seems well. I've exercised it pretty thoroughly. Obviously I changed the shares to match the new environment, some file paths, housekeeping. Just want to make sure I'm not open to issues moving forward by not doing a righteous Install.

I had tried to install pyTivo Desktop on a Mac with Catalina OS and the installer failed, most likely because I fool around with my OSs and probably as a byproduct made something incompatible. So I copied pyTivo Desktop over from a working Majave setup.

 

[Wil]

I think the reason you are having problems is Catalina is 64 bit system vs a 32 bit system.

The brute force copying from a working Mojave continues to work fine, I just have this nagging fear I overlooked something that could bite me someday.

EDIT: After a couple of weeks I'm having all kinds of minor issues. Really trivial, almost nothing. Slight delays, lags, blank list screens that have to be refreshed. Tivos temporarily disappearing every few days instead of every few months as before. Of course my switchover to Catalina and resetting some system settings may be the underlying cause. But my non-standard install of pyTivo is on my mind.

Nobody else here migrated a pyTivo server to Catalina?

 

[Wil]

I just don't have the time, or motivation, to fix it. And even if I did my Mac will only go up to High Sierra

Works on Catalina for me, as I previously noted. I am having very minor issues but I think they are coincidental and not caused by Catalina itself.

The Installer does not work for me, again as I noted; my Catalina version of pyTivo is simply a brute force copy over from my previous working version and I'd suggest that to anyone else having install failure. I'm hoping the installer doesn't do anything else subtle.

 

[Wil]

it was basically impossible cram them all into a single file, so the installer just made more sense.

Understood.

Hence my original question, in the absence of an Installer that works any more: Is it OK to just brute force fresh install pyTivo Desktop on a Mac by copying the entire pyTivo Application folder from a working Mac and copying the startup to the System library? Does the Installer really do anything else I need to be concerned about?

(obviously I needed to update paths and such to match the new environment)

As I said before, this is working for me in Catalina. The issues I'm having I'm 90%+ certain are from other causes and I can track them down eventually but I'd love the reassurance that there aren't some other subtleties in the Installer I need to pursue.

 

[Wil]

I have Mac Catalina and also Paralels with Windows 10 and am having no luck with either on in regards to PyTivo. Is there any where to get the files in order to do a "brute force copy". I'm actually moving to a place where they do not have Xfinity access so I'm going to have to sell my Tivo boxes but I'm hoping to pull all the videos off of them first.

No one here answered my question about the brute force copying. It seems to work for me. I'm running with Catalina by just copying the whole Desktop pyTivo folder in the Applications folder from a working Mojave system over to Catalina and reconfiguring paths to match the new environment. I think the option to autostart was available only during the original installation, I don't see an option to add that after the fact, so I set that up manually also. Seems to work alright.

Outside of Desktop pyTivo itself, a standalone pyTivo has always run fine on other Catalina computers for me, it's only the Installer of the pyTivo Desktop version that's not worked.

 

[Wil]

desktop pyTivo folder that can be posted online or something like that so guys like me with Catalina can download it and use pyTivo? The installer is what is holding me up

That could only be done with the permission of the developer and because he's using products with restrictions from other developers he might be reluctant. But you could ask.

What you are trying to do, just get your files off a Tivo, can be done just as well with kmttg. That is still the most widely used method for that purpose and it still works fine under Catalina, though I actually prefer remotely running it from my Mac on a Windows box, via Microsoft Remote Desktop, so I can use it with the wonderful VideoReDo.

Generally though, when I install such a draconian, sea change of an OS like Catalina, I keep my old OS running on a throwaway external drive I can boot into to handle issues. There are always issues. You could do that, then install Desktop pyTivo through its Installer, if you really want this version. Then just copy the pyTivo folder from the Applications folder from one drive to the other. If you want auto-startup (as far as I can tell, the only thing you lose) there are several ways of accomplishing that and if you get that far ask about it and I'll describe a couple of the simpler ways.

 

[Wil]

no luck with [kmttg on] my MacBook Air

Kmttg works fine on my PowerBook under Catalina. It's been years since I set it up but my advice in general would be don't rush, even though there are only a few steps. It helps if you understand what you're doing but when I don't (which can be quite often with this kind of thing) I just go painfully slow and double/triple check everything as I go.