[Dan203]

FYI VideoReDo has it's own commercial detection engine which is available via COM if you're interested in tapping into it.

Dan

 

[Dan203]

I've never used comskip so I don't know how it compares to our ad detective. However iit can be completely automated like you want. In fact there is another user here on the forum who has written an app which uses it to automatically commercial scan and convert all .tivo files to .mpg...

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=359550

I don't believe it has the transcoding abilities of your program but perhaps you two should collaborate and come up with a solution that does it all.

Dan

 

[Dan203]

@Dan203,

Is that you and your son (on the VRD Home Page)?

No. That's stock art we've been using for years. A new website is on my short list, so we may be getting rid of frick and frack soon.

 

[Dan203]

For the record, I am open to other ways of doing it, if they exist. I'm not committed to KMTTG.

Have you looked at my pyTivo Desktop software? It's a complete replacement for TiVo Desktop that can download and decrypt your recordings all in one step.

 

[Dan203]

The UI only supports decrypting during download. But in the install folder there is a file called tivolibre.exe that you could use on the commandline to decrypt your shows. Although based on your previous comments I'm not sure if the command line is really your speed.

 

[Dan203]

VideoReDo requires the TiVo DirectShow filter to open .tivo files. You get that by either installing TiVo Desktop or pyTivo Desktop

 

[Dan203]

Start the batch manager in VideoReDo. It has a check for COM and will register it for you if it detects that it's not registered, or if the wrong version is registered.

 

[Dan203]

I believe that kmttg decrypts the .tivo file before sending it in to VRD QSF so tivolibre is removing the bad section before VRD even gets a chance to fix it. In VRD we use the TiVo DirectShow filter which doesn't skip the bad parts. Then the VRD secret sauce can, sometimes. reconstruct some of the bad parts resulting in a cleaner copy.

 

[Dan203]

FYI DirectShow Dump still doesn't work as well as VideoReDo. There are two ways to use the TiVo DirectShow filter to decrypt. We discovered last year that when in one mode when the filter hits one of these TS errors it will stop decrypting until it hits the next key packet. In the other it picks back up decrypting as soon as it gets past the error. We switched VRD to the second mode. But it appears DSD still uses the first, so it's decryption wont be as clean.

 

[Dan203]

I actually wrote my own decryption program years ago, before DSD, that uses the better method. (never released) In fact that's how I figured out VRD was doing it wrong because I was getting better output from my little program. I just dug up the code recently. I was thinking about bundling it with pyTivo Desktop in some way.

 

[Dan203]

When you installed TiVo Desktop did you select "all users" or "just me"?

That error from VRD means it could not initialize the TiVo DirectShow filter. So it could mean that the service doesn't have access to the DS filter.

 

[Dan203]

though I do wish the TS/not-TS choice was in the menus, not in the config dialogs, then at least I could toggle it more quickly.

PyTivo Desktop has an option "let me choose" which puts a TS an PS link next to each show.

 

[Dan203]

Yeah, that's why a Mac was never in the cards for me - too limiting in terms of software availability. It would seem if I did have a Mac at least a Windows VM would be required for my needs.

There's nothing in TiVo XML or RPC recording metadata about video codec information, so there's no way to code in automatically a prefer PS but use TS when needed kind of option.

Yeah I was looking at that too. I was considering trying to download a little bit if the show first, check it with ffmpeg to see if it has a video stream, then switch to TS if it doesn't.

 

[Dan203]

I believe the opposite could be done. If you try to download a show from the Tivo as a TS format, but it is in PS format. You'll get a very small file result with the error identified within the .Tivo file. Going by memory, so I might be wrong.

No. MPEG-2 files can be downloaded as either. H.264 files can only be downloaded as TS. If you attempt to download an H.264 video as PS it will still download but it will only contain the audio.

 

[Dan203]

I have done this with PyTivo (9032 instead of 8181) using my iPad. Selecting a show for download would be stored on the PyTivo hosted computer.

FYI the Desktop UI in my pyTivo is actually HTML and can be accessed from any device if you go to http://<PC IP>:9032/Desktop

It works best in Chrome, but most modern browsers can run it ok.

 

[Dan203]

Not sure what to tell you other than to experiment a bit and see what works the best. I run a two job limit on my 6 core, 12 hyper-threaded machine, but I run two instanances of kmttg. The service in the background for xfer, decrypt, & ad-detect and the UI for ad-cut, captions, & encode. It gives me decent performance and allows others programs to be responsive. It also depends on which programs you run for the various tasks as some are single-threaded, and some are multi-threaded. Some of the multi-threaded programs like ffmpeg allow you to set a thread limit, whereas other programs like VideoRedo do not.

It's not really possible in VideoReDo. VideoReDo's output uses a chain of modules and each module runs in it's own thread. There is no way for us to limit the number of threads used because it can vary wildly depending on the output options you choose.

We do offer an option to lower the priority of the threads spawned by the output process. In that case Windows should allow other programs to execute first so VideoReDo doesn't cause your PC to becomes unresponsive. Although all of that logic is handled by Windows, so I can't guarantee how well it works.

 

[Dan203]

I wasn't trying to say anything bad about VideoRedo. I use VideoRedo for Decrypt/QSFix, ad-detect, ad-cut & Encode. I was just pointing out the granularity in fine tuning ffmpeg vs VideoRedo for encode.

I didn't take it as an insult. Just explaining why we can't offer an option like that in VideoReDo.

 

[Dan203]

Despite what DanR said on our forum we need that BOM in some of our own code to make the unicode characters parse properly when reading text based file, so we can't just remove it. We do have an option in VRD to read unicode XML without a BOM if it has an encoding declaration in the XML itself, so it's possible that we could maybe remove it from the project files, but we use a common text file writer class for all text file output from VRD so we'd have to explicitly turn off BOM writing for project files to do that. Not sure how easy that is to do. So if it's possible fix in kmttgs parser instead that would be ideal.

The BOM should be something that most XML parsers and text readers can deal with. It's been around for a long time and is common for text files with UTF8/unicode characters.

 

[Dan203]

There are only a few minor differences in the API from v5 to v6 as long as you were using the "new" API in v5 and not the legacy API. v6 removes the legacy API completely, which we warned people about when v5 introduced the new API. The v6 API has just 3 changes I think would affect the current kmttg scripts...

ProfilesGetProfileEnabled has changed to ProfilesGetProfileIsEnabled

We added a new function to detect AdScan profiles called ProfilesGetProfileIsAdScan. (AdScan profiles will be returned as part of the list so you'll need to filter them)

All of the old AdScan functions have been renamed to include "Interactive" at the front like so...

InteractiveAdScanToggleScan
InteractiveAdScanIsScanning
InteractiveAdScanSetParameter
InteractiveAdScanGetParameter
InteractiveAdScanResetParameters

Updating the scripts to use these changes should be trivial.