[Sam Ray]

I am sorry I did not see the replies before now. Thank you very much for them. I had assumed I would get notification of replies; I had thought I set that up. I will check that later.

We have a Premiere (TCD746320) that is nearly two years old. Apparently the hard drive is bad. We have already purchased a Premiere XL4.

I posted previously in this and related posts in that thread.

The main thing I want is the thumbs-up data. I assume (am hoping) it is in a XML file. The reason I want the thumbs-up data is because my mother used it to keep track of what (movies) she has seen. It is unfortunate that Tivo has not implemented something for that specifically.

So no, I do not expect to be able to get the videos.

The drive from the TCD746320 is not doing well. I might be able to copy it (to be used in antoter drive) but that is not a priority. The TCD746320 was more than one year old but less than two years old when it failed. I did the drive self-test thing that is provided by Tivo and assuming I did it correctly the overnight test failed on everything except the initialization.

I did find the WinMFS and such when I was searching a couple of months ago. I eventually found comments saying it does not work with newer Tivos. So just now before I found these replies I found jmfs. I assume I must have 10 posts to be able to download jmfs so after this post I will be able to.

So do I understand correctly that the recommendation is to put jmfs on a CD and boot it and then I can look at the Tivo files with it?

 

[Sam Ray]

Thank you unitron, but I am not trying to copy the drive for using in a new drive. I might try that later. I will however burn jmfs to a CD and see what I can do with it.

 

[Sam Ray]

And to add to what unitron said, what happens when we do something like:

https://192.168.1.4/TiVoConnect?Command=QueryContainer&Container=/NowPlaying
​

I realize it is possible that the XML file is generated each time a command such as that is received.

 

[Sam Ray]

If you're just trying to transfer your Season Passes, etc..

I think you did not read what I said.

Or perhaps there is something that the Tivo web site does that it does not specify and the customer service people do not know about.

Can the TiVo website transfer thumbs-up data?

 

[Sam Ray]

No. It cannot.

Unless you can figure out how to copy the drive before ti fails completely, I have never heard of anyone taking a specific piece of data like thumbs and pulling it off the drive. I have heard of people taking pictures of screens to preserve this data, but that is it.

Even if the drive was good, is there any way to get the data without using the drive in the Tivo unit? Even if we cannot do that, is there a way to get Tivo to list everything that has thumbs-up as a computer-readable file? I assume not, if it is true that the data is encrypted and can only be decrypted by hardware in the Tivo unit. I even do not know how to get the thumbs-up data using the Tivo UI so we can copy it manually.

Tivo could provide a way to get the thumbs data in XML format in the same manner as the Now Playing data. The Wishlist data would also be useful. As far as I know the only reason they do not is because they do not want to. They also could provide a way for the Tivo to remember everything that has previously been recorded; movies at least. Show episodes would be more complicated but movies would be easy enough to store. Data such as that could be stored in a "cloud" somewhere.

 

[Sam Ray]

TiVo COULD do lots of things, but they normally concentrate on items that give the biggest bang for the buck. Keeping an ever growing list of things recorded does not make much sense to me, it would be HUGE and neverending.

Many think it is a foolish idea and many think it would be extremely useful. It would be a big bang for those that would use it. It is very likely that as soon as their competition does it, it will become a high priority for Tivo to do it.

From the point of view of a customer viewing the list, it could easily get huge. From the point of view of a developer, it would be small. You need to understand from the point of view of a software developer; the data does not need to ever be viewed by a person. It would be very useful as data that Tivo uses internally but people seldom look at.

As for size, it could potentially be quite small (as small as 20 bytes of data per show) in terms of hard drive space, but you need to understand how databases work to understand what I mean.

 

[Sam Ray]

One other possible (if unlikely) route to this data is via the newer API the TiVo remote apps for iOS and Android use:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=462980
I suggest reading through that thread(it starts to get interesting around post 54 or so) and possibly asking there if anyone has an ideas.

Based on this it sounds likely but I have been mislead by comments such as that in the past. I will look at the documentation and such later. I am not a Python or Java programmer although I am a C++ and C# programmer. I began learning C/C++ before Java existed. I assume I can use the Java at least as a sample.

So if I were to get something like that working then I would try putting the drive back into the Tivo and hopefully the drive is working enough for me to get the thumbs data. It will likely be a couple of months before I can do that; I have other work to do.

 

[Sam Ray]

You might be able to do as another has recently done and use

dd_rescue

to copy the drive to another known good drive and get the TiVo running again.

Yes, thank you. I am hopeful that something like that is possible. I did not ask about that here since I did not want to distract this thread with that but it is good that you mentioned dd_rescue since it is a specific suggestion. I know that I can go to other threads for more about all that. The hard part is finding a good drive to use, especially the money part.