[davesanti]

Hey all, I took a quick look but didn't seem to find an answer..

Does anyone have their Tivo set up to stream or pull videos and photos from a NAS device, with or without downloading to the Tivo.

I have an unslung NSLU2 serving music in my house and would like to find a way to use the Tivo as the viewing device for videos and photos pulled off the HDD attached to the NSLU. Aside from file conversion issue (to mpg2 or .tivo) is this feasible.

I see py is available for the NSLU, but it specifically says it doesn't work with pictures and also says that an unmodified Series 3 TiVos can use HMO/HME with pyTivo

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/TiVoServer

Any ideas?

Dave

 

[Dan203]

TiVoToGo, and the companion TiVoToComeBack feature, are not available on S3 units period. So there is no way to transfer videos to a S3 regardless of what software server you are using. I'm guessing that the reason pyTiVo doesn't do pictures is because it was not implemented by the author. TiVo requires that photos served to a TiVo be in a very specific resolution and in the JPEG format. To support photos one would need a library capable of opening various photo formats, converting them to the proper resolution, and then converting them to JPEG. Such a library might not exist for the NSLU architecture, thus the absence of the feature.

That is an awesome find though. I'm going to have to try hacking my NSLU2 and see if I can get it running. Right now my NSLU2 is a paperweight as a Linksys approved firmware wiped out all my auto-backups and now refuses to allow me to add more.

Dan

 

[davesanti]

Thanks, Dan.

I understand that S3 cant do TTG. I guess the slug can run PY to get HME/HMO.

I havent tried that yet. I have a Series 2, not 3.

Dave

 

[Dan203]

I just set up my NSLU2 to run pyTiVo. While it does work it is slooooooow. After selecting an Xvid encoded AVI it took 30+ seconds just to start encoding. Then I could literally sit there and watch the encoded frames count by like seconds. Maybe 2 frames per second max. At that rate it would have taken roughly 7.5 hours to transfer a 30 minute program. I probably could have messed with the bitrate and resolution setting a bit to speed it up a little, but the processor in this thing is just not designed to be a transcoding server. If you only wanted to use it for .tivo/.mpg files then it might be fine, but it was just not deigned for realtime transcoding.

So now that I got my NSLU2 all setup with unslung does anyone know of any other cool apps I can run on it?

Dan

 

[chip_r]

Does anyone have their Tivo set up to stream or pull videos and photos from a NAS device, with or without downloading to the Tivo.

Yes but it's Galleon on a Kurobox HG (open Linkstation) NAS, not the NSLU2. Just comparing the hardware specs between the two NAS boxes, the CPU speed is the same, CPU architecture is different (ARM vs. PPC), but I think RAM is the biggest problem. I believe the NSLU2 is 32MB and the Kurobox HG is 128MB. The Java JRE used for Galleon is such a system hog. With Galleon running on my box, I'm very close to heavy disk swapping. So with less memory, even if you get the JRE going for the ARM, you might be very disappointed with performance.

Here's a link that describes the setup process for the HG you might be able to adapt to the NSLU2:
http://www.kurobox.com/mwiki/index.php/Debian_Galleon_Media_Server

For me, performance is bearable because most of what I record is "high" quality not "best" and with a wired connection, I can almost always keep up with real-time video transfers while watching. Almost meaning that if the NAS is busy pulling a show from one TiVo and I'm trying to watch a show stored on the NAS on my second TiVo, I need to give the NAS little head start to avoid stuttering. That problem is more likely a disk drive issue because I just use a Maxtor disk for the NAS (nothing special). If not other shows are being transferred while I'm watching, the NAS keeps up with the stream.

As Dan203 pointed out, realtime transcoding is way to CPU intensive for these little NAS boxes to be useful. Streaming does work with enough memory.

chip_r