Control Apple TV 2 with TiVo Peanut Remote

One remote to rule them all!  Ok, that was cheesy, but couldn't resist.  Here's a little tidbit I stumbled onto that has made living with a blended TiVo and Apple TV family a little happier. This may seem like a silly tip, but if you've had a TiVo forever, you know that your brain is programmed to control the peanut remote on an instinctual level.  I find the control layout is a fantastic match to the functions of the Apple TV.

 In addition to the cool, space-age aluminum remote bundled with the ATV, the ok iPhone Remote app, and the awesome iPad remote app, there is another option.  In the remote control settings page of the Apple TV lies a feature that allows the device to learn the codes from pretty much any other remote you might have laying around.  It's sort of like a reverse learning remote control.

Now here's the trick, the remote control for my TiVo has the little 1-2 slider switch that is designed to control two separate TiVo boxes in the same location (hey, some people LOVE them some TiVo).  By default, this little switch doesn't do anything, it controls the DVR in either position until it is trained to do otherwise.  I simply programmed my TiVo to be DVR #1 and programmed the remote accordingly.  That left position 2 on the clicker doing nothing at all.  Once that was done, I just followed the prompts to program the basic and advanced remote features of the TiVo peanut into the Apple TV and everything worked great (as long as I remembered to put the switch in the right position).

The links below will walk you through the steps necessary to set up each device.

TiVo support article for controlling multiple devices with one remote.  
important note: when performing step 5, DO NOT point the remote at your TiVo (go to another room or keep the remote covered) otherwise you will simply change your TiVo to use the DVR 2 IR codes.

Apple support article for "learn remote" feature of Apple TV 2

Final note, if you lack the 1-2 switch on your remote, in addition to the sponsored links above, you can purchase replacement remotes (and pretty much everything else TiVo related) from weaKnees.  I am also not totally sure if the older style remotes that have this switch can can control a Premier unit or not.  They work fine for everything from the Series 1 to the HD units I've had.

Play any Shoutcast stream through TiVo (OS X and iTunes)

I discovered this feature by total accident the other day.  This may be well known, but who knows, I figured it might be worth sharing to anyone that stumbles across this.

Those of us with TiVos and Macs are kind of left out in the cold when it comes to the built-in functionality of the TiVo supplied TiVo Desktop for Macs.  You get only photo and music sharing (and some basic video publishing if you hack it).  If you want anything more advanced you have to spring for commercial software from Roxio (or go with one of the unsupported, but excellent community apps like PyTiVoX).  Anyway, there's one thing the stock software offers that as far as I know the Windows version doesn't: sharing your iTunes library complete with playlists to your TiVo units.

The fact you can share iTunes playlists with the Mac version of the default desktop is nice to begin with.  But, it turns out if you have a ShoutCast (or similar streaming audio) location saved within iTunes, you can select it from your library and the stream will play. I noticed this simply because a streaming station ended up in a smart playlist and just started playing along with my regular MP3 files.

It's pretty simple to setup, here's the details:

The first step is to download and install the TiVo Desktop then configure iTunes Sharing.

Next, add the address for a stream in iTunes, which can be found under the Advanced menu.  As an example, I'm using the audio feed from TWiT, which steams live and recorded audio from the podcasts being recorded by Leo Laporte's TWiT network.

Enter the URL:

When you click OK, a link to the stream will show up in your music library like any other audio file.  To make it easier to find on the TiVo side you can add it to or create a new playlist so it's listed on the top level of your iTunes listing on your DVR.

Once you have the file in iTunes, go over to your DVR and select your shared iTunes library from the Music, Photos and Showcases menu.  From there you can navigate to the location of your newly added stream and just hit play to begin streaming.

Keep in mind this is just simple streaming, as far as I can tell it won't send across any metadata such as current track or play times, but it's a nice little undocumented feature to have.

Some mini updates and random thoughts

Ok, it's been a while since I've updated the blog. To my one reader, I apologize for my slacker tendencies. The family is about to embark on a vacation to Orlando for a couple nights then a 3 night Disney cruise with a baby and a really rambunctious toddler, should be entertaining. Which of course there's another week with out an article. I am planning on tweeting photos as I go (during the non-international roaming parts of the trip.) So if you're interested, play along on Twitter

In the mean time, I'm just going to throw out a few notes on the great TiVo crisis and a couple of articles I have bouncing around in my head.

TiVo crisis update: After a lot of troubleshooting which involved ripping apart the Western Digital TiVo extender (really an over glorified mybook eSATA drive) as well as the TiVo itself to run extensive hard drive tests from WD. Both tests came back clean which was odd. So that essentially left either the SATA cable, the CableCard (yikes!) or some actual hardware issue. Unfortunately the next option I had was to disconnect the extender and let the TiVo divorce it (therefore deleting all of my videos).

This test so far has proven successful, no issues, and my wife's American Idol episodes actually recorded. For some reason Idol was the first program that started showing signs of distress and it ALWAYS got screwed up after that. The unit has been crusing along for over a week with no signs of distress, so I am calling the issue as a bad SATA cable (or connector on one of the units, we'll soon find out when I order a new cable.

In the pipeline.
One the IT Pro font, I've gotten approval for the Drobo Pro to extend the Dell NAS server we use for our disk to disk backup system. Before I attach it there, I'd like to slap it on a workstation to play with it a little and get some peliminary performance numbers. Then I want to see if I can get it talking with a VMWare ESX host as an iSCSI device. If I can I'll then try to run some numbers on it vs. direct storage and our 2gbps fibre channel SAN. I don't expect a lot on the VMWare front as I think the unit will probably take a beating on I/O. But if it can actually work, it might be a good solution for guest machines that don't hit the disk system a lot or are low use type machines.

Finally, some iPhone love is in the works too. I went crazy and downloaded a ton of apps trying to win the billionth app contest (alas I lost). They were all free apps, and I've been culling the ones I deem crappy. When the reckoning is finally over, I'll write about what's left as I did find a couple of cool, or at least amusing (I'm talking about you, iPity (link opens to random review I found on Google)) apps.

That's it for now folks, time to find some sandals to pack!

The Great TiVO Meltdown of '09

***Update***
Well... it turns out that my celebration was a little premature. After plugging along for all of yesterday, the TiVo started again. I was actually in the process of pulling shows off of this DVR (I'll post in the future about iTiVo to do this) but I only got a few shows in before it started acting up, wife so not happy. I'm pretty sure it actually is a HDD problem now that I've got it back up and running again and I can see some of the oddball behavior.

The moral I guess is do whatever the internets tell you. But the info in this post is still a handy troubleshooting tip since CableCard problems can, in fact cause weird stuff to happen too.
***/Update***


Alright, so this doesn't exactly count as any sort of free stuff. But the internets pretty much failed me when Googling around for a solution, and if I listened to those lying liars I'd be out a new hard drive. So here's my little story that I figured I might share with my interweb friends so that someone else may not suffer.

Last night, as my wife and I sat down to watch a popular reality show in which punk ass kids ruin famous songs, I was greeted with a black screen and no audio. Yeah, I know it was God saying I should do something more constructive with my time. Basic troubleshooting ensued, and it was quickly determined the TiVO was behaving badly. So as is the tradition with said devices, I pulled the plug to do a hostile reboot.

For those of you keeping score, this was my big daddy TiVO, the TiVO HD with the TiVO Extender attached to our main (and only HD) TV. So what happened next nearly made me weep openly. The TiVO dutifuly went through its bootup procedure (the welcome powering up, just another minute screens) and then the screen went black and started back at the powering up screen, which means the unit had rebooted while powering up. Probably not good. Let it go through another sequence, same deal. Pulled the plug for a couple minutes, tried again, another reboot.

$@*!

Time for my BFF, Google to help me out here. I searched on reboot loops, and was horrified with what I saw. Apparently, constant reboots are pretty much always caused by a faulty hard drive.

Double $@*!

Very near weeping at this point.

I found some info on performing what are called "kickstart" codes that force low level diagnostics on a TiVO . For whatever reason, I couldn't get these stupid things to work, I'm pretty sure I did it right, but I want to say in the back of my mind I read somewhere that the new version 11 software uses a different procedure to do diagnostics. By the time I figured out the kickstarting wasn't going to do it for me a great deal of time had passed, and I was pretty much giving up, but first a few tests.

The first thing I did was power off, then unplug my extender. Interestingly the TiVO booted a little further and eventually came to the "hey what did you do with the extender" screen. At that point I could have hit clear to divorce my TiVO from the extender and try to continue to boot. A viable step save for the fact that my wife had several unwatched episodes of Grey's Anatomy on there, if I deleted those unecessarily, a dead TiVO would be the least of my trouble.

So now what? Well I went with a little more Googling, a few more kickstart attempts, and some abject panic to no avail. I was just about to give up and sacrifice Dr. Grey for the greater good when an epiphany of basic troubleshooting hit me. I hadn't messed with the cablecards yet. For those of you who haven't had the opportunity to deal with them, cable cards are a complete and total pain in the ass and the cause of no shortage of headaches on the road to HD TiVO goodness.

So I pull the plug yet again, open the access door on the front up and pop out the cablecard. I plug the TiVo back in and it goes through startup. Then it keeps going, and keeps going (startup is crazy slow on these things, so this is a really good thing.) After the usual several minute wait, I'm presented not with another reboot, but a screen asking me to configure my cablecards since the TiVo seems to have lost them. This is new and promising. I shove the cable card back in and go to the diagnostics, no signal listed, so I'm not overly optimistic yet. So I decide to cancel out of the cablecard setup menu.

AND THE TiVo GOES TO THE TiVo CENTRAL LIST!!!!! WOOHOO, it's all there, the 3 minutes of Idol it tried to record before its near-death experience, and yes, Grey's Anatomy was there just as it had been left, I get to sleep in my bed tonight!

Ok, but what about the cable? Well, after doing the happy dance, I got greedy and decided I'd like it to continue to record new stuff. I dropped out to live TV and at first the searching for signal screen popped up. Then, something beautiful happened, a TV channel appeared, then I channeled, and another channel was there, then one more and I was watching the Weather Channel in glorious HD (I know, crazy). All seemed right with the world.

Don't ask me what happened, I have no earthly clue. I just need to transfer those Grey's off of the thing just in case it breaks again.

Useful links:
http://www.tivocommunity.com
http://www.wkforums.com/forums/

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/