PyTivo

Welcome to my random musings of stuff I find useful, and blissfully cost free Remember, a lot of this stuff involves a lot of time and sweat from real people. You should support these efforts if you find them very useful by whatever method requested by the authors.

I’ll start off the festivities with a little writeup on an app that has transformed my TiVO from a simple DVR to a whole house video jukebox system.

PyTivo is an open source effort that uses a number of different open source tools to convert just about any video format you can think of and serving it up to any Series 2, 3, HD, etc tivos on your local network. When configured, your PC, or Mac, or Linux box will show up on your TiVO in a similar manner to other DVRs. Just select the video you want to transfer, and depending on your network speed and quality settings, either go find something else to do, or start watching right away.

PyTivo can be configured to serve up both Standard Def and HD content, and can even down convert HD content to your old caveman era SD TiVOs eliminating the need for multiple copies of the same content. Most video formats are supported including VOB, MKV, AVI, MP4.

I run PyTivo on my iMac with a USB external HDD. Oddly enough, the original version of PyTivo is actually pretty difficult on the Mac. You have to install the actual PyTivo as well as compiling a version of FFMEPG to run on your Mac (which involves XCode tools and downloading the components from an online repository). It’s pretty intimidating at first, but once it’s up and running its very stable. By contrast, the PC version is a simple single installer and you’re up and running. All versions use a web interface to tweak the settings.

Fortunately, someone has finally stepped in and built a GUI version of PyTivo called PyTivoX. The GUI version is very easy to configure, but does lack the ability to control some of the advanced settings from within the GUI (you can still modify the configuration files to change the advanced settings as you would in the regular version of PyTivo). I ran the graphical version briefly, but as I had my older version up and running with the advanced settings configured, I stuck with that version.

Once everything was up and running, I pretty much only have to fire up the DVD Player when I don’t want to take the time to rip a DVD. The kids wants to watch Finding Nemo for the 43rd time on any TV in the house? No problem, it’s on TiVO.

Useful links:

PyTiVO project: http://pytivo.armooo.net/

PyTiVO discussion forums: http://pytivo.krkeegan.com/

The steps I followed to install the original PyTivo: http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2008/12/01/how-to-install-pytivo-on-a-mac/

PyTiVOX: http://code.google.com/p/pytivox/