series TMSID->FSID?

[angra]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of making a tool to do some minimalist backup and restores of user-space data on my tivo, and I'm (sort of) spinning my wheels on one problem.

One of the things I'm backing up is season passes - now, since the important data in a SP points to objects, I need something immutable to store for backups. In other words, storing a pointer to a particular object item (say, via a fsid) would not make sense, since, in the event of a catastrophic failure and rebuild, the series and station info might live at new FSID's (I assume...?).

So, what I was planning to do is to store tmsid's. These seem immutable. The only problem is, I cant find a direct way to go from a series/program tmsid to a fsid. Getting the station ID seems pretty easy, at least.

I looked in /GuideIndexV2/tms.index and /GuideIndexV2/tms.key, and that hasn't quite gotten me there yet. I have been reading through the index.itcl source included with the search module for tivoweb - they have a routine which does some parsing of program.key and program.index. unfortunately, the tms* files aren't quite analogous, or so it seems. Also, tms.index does not seem to have a constant record size(!), which confuses me further.

Anyway, I guess I am soliciting suggestions that will either help me understand /GuideIndexV2/tms.{index, key}, or another method to investigate to quickly translate a tmsid to a fsid for a series.

p.s. what tmsid types can a season pass be linked to? EP seems right out, SH is an obvious yes, but what about MV, and SP? Can those have season passes attached to them?

Thanks, all

[TheDoctor]

The TMSid in a program record should be 4 bytes longer than a series id. The 4 bytes are the episode number following the series id. There are also TMSids of other lenths for station info etc, but I don't think those are what you are talking about.

[angra]

on further review, I had a bad transfer - the record lengths in tms.index and tms.key are both constant length (16). for posterity, what I've found so far of the records:

bytes description
------------------------
0-1 tms type (EP, MV, SH, or SP)
2 0 for program, 1 for series (is it possible
for a SP to refer to a program, and not a series? So far
I think no)
3-10 ID# (on quick view, it looks like only bytes 7-10 are used,
except that some have a value in byte 6, but never
series)
11-15 FSID

on another topic, I discovered that the tms.index file I have on my tivo will _not_ transfer correctly via FTP - anyone have an idea why that would be, or how I can get around that?

[angra]

Well, I'm almost done.

Can anyone suggest a good (automated) source of series TMSid's for testing/verification?

I'll post my routines up here when I've done verifying.