Sharing Video over Ethernet

[mrblack51]

Well, with the pending release of the Replay 4000, room-to-room video sharing will be a reality. Well, I for one would like to see it on the tivo as well. The bottom line is that we know it is possible, since Tridge said he did it (that was the original use of TiVoNet), but he decided not to release it due to issues with TiVo. Since replay is doing it, they will receive the major flak for it, so lets get it working on the tivo.

What is standing between us streaming a program over TiVonet? Lets get a discussion going on this topic.

[TheDoctor]

Sounds like fun. I had been curious about this. I rember reading in one of the AVS posts that someone had played xternal MPEG1 video by killing myworld and using audio control to release control of the sound device. Then he cat'ed the vido and audio to the /dev entries (would have to look them up.) I sounded like MPEG2 streams would probably be supported as well, but I have not tried yet. I will see if I can dig up that link...

[TheDoctor]

This was the thread I was thinking of.
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum6/HTML/005923.html

On review I see embeem was involved.

quote:
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The MPEGCS22 is targeted for the digital audio/video decompression arena. The chip is fully compliant with all features of the ISO/IEC 13818-2 Recommendation H.262 Draft International Standard (also called "MPEG-2 standard") Main Profile/Main Level. It supports interlaced output video data and is capable of supporting MPEG-2 I,P,B compressed data streams up to an average rate of 15Mbits/second. The MPEGCS22 is also backward compatible to support the ISO/IEC International Standard 11172-2 (11/93)(also called "MPEG-1 standard"). The integrated audio decoder is capable of decoding MPEG-2 compatible Layer I and Layer II streams in full support of compliant bit rates and sample rates to produce two-channel basic stereo (no downmixing) digital audio output....

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I can confirm it too. I took the "badday" short video that used to roam the 'net a few years ago, converted it to a SVCD compliant stream (video NTSC 29.97 fps, MPEG2 480x480, VBR max 2300 kbit/s, audio MPEG1 layer 2 44.1 kHz, 192 kbit/s), demuxed it, transfered over serial link to the TiVo, killed myworld, ran 'audioctl off', then 'cat badday.m2v > /dev/mpeg0v & cat badday.mp2 > /dev/mpeg0a'. Worked flawlessly.
--kazymyr

[mrblack51]

ok, thats an awesome start. now, we have a way of getting video on the tivo, and we know what format it wants. now, how about getting it input into the mfs.

At this point, we can pull stuff off just fine with extractstream, and we can create stuff just fine as evidenced by kazymyr. SO, I see the next step as getting a video off of a mounted share into the mfs. ideas?

[TheDoctor]

No need.
I am wathing video I extracted to a samba mount a month ago...('Hackers', a PBS special.)

Start playing a video.
kill eventswitcher
load smbfsxxxxx.o
mount drive
kill audio
cat video

WATCH
.....
I had been planning to use a second drive formated in ext2 but samba is working great look just like origional. We should be able to just creat sockets and pipe to dev....

Actual commands used...
bash-2.02# ps ax
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
65 ? SW 0:00 EventSwitch

bash-2.02# kill 65
bash-2.02# insmod -f /hack/bin/smbfs-2.0.1.o
Warning: kernel-module version mismatch
bash-2.02# smbmount (enter your own)
Password:
Can't get /etc/mtab~ lock file
bash-2.02# /var/hack/audioctl off
bash-2.02# cat /mnt/hackers.m2a > /dev/mpeg0a & cat /mnt/hackers.m2v > /dev/mpeg0v

This was a High Quality recording and is playing error free.

I should be able to build a playback batchfile and save it along with the audio and video files.

[TheDoctor]

Natually after about 12 minutes audio started getting out os sync. That may be because I used an old version of extract stream. We should probably not merge multipal fsid into a single file, but instead use multi lines in batch entry.

Oh well, its time to watch live tv for a while...

[Fugg]

dude!

too damn cool!!!

btw, i got a "command not found" with audioctl.

you running 1.3?

i killed myworld (eventswitcher) on the tivo central screen, so the graphics stayed on there,:)
got to remember that next time!
but the damn thing was playing off MY HARD DRIVE!!!!!

too damn cool!!!

[Fugg]

man!
it'll play 320x240 mpeg1 files, too!

i used tmpeg to split em, then moved em to the shared directory.

the video worked!

i still don't have audio, but it was playing off MY HARD DRIVE!!!!!

and mpeg1's, at that!!

:D

[Fugg]

i found audioctl!!!

woohoo!!!

[embeem]

Originally posted by Fugg
i found audioctl!!!

woohoo!!!

gee, did you find mpgtx too?

[Fugg]

now i can watch all of my old 320x240 mpeg1's on my tivo!
this thing kicks butt!!

thankyou sir embeem!!!!!!
:)

[TroyCarpenter]

This is great stuff! Now if the programs can be cataloged and controlled via the TiVo software, that would be great.

BTW, did you have to reboot your TiVo after doing this, or were you able to just restart the myworld program?

I am not anywhere near ready to try this...I just got ppp working about 30 mins ago...I am now ready for bed.

Good work, guys.

Troy

[TroyCarpenter]

[deleting redundant information] - Troy

[Fugg]

-

[SuperVHS]

on that other forum......

Bicster started a new version of zaptivo to backup the harddrive that worked similar to Tiger's mfstools. Bicster's software is open source. Unfortunately, he got side tracked and asked for help in finishing it. There might be some very good things in there that would allow the video streams to be moved from/to mfs and thus be able to play the videos just like normal.

If someone is willing to help him, a lot of goodies might come out of it.

[TheDoctor]

mpgtx can be found at sourceforge. It appears to be a command line mpeg editing tool. I have not tried.

[Fugg]

Originally posted by TheDoctor
mpgtx can be found at sourceforge. It appears to be a command line mpeg editing tool. I have not tried.


thanks, Doc.
:)

[TheDoctor]

I tried writting a socket reciever in tcl as I don't have a crosscompiler setr up. I could not get nc to accept an incoming socket. Anyway Paste the text below to a file and point it to the mpeg0v.

===========
#!/tvbin/tivosh
proc session {chan addr port} {
fconfigure $chan -buffering none -translation binary
while {[gets $chan line] >= 0} {
puts $line
}
}

global quit
set quit 0
socket -server session 4322
vwait quit
===========
execute with:

bash 2.02# ./socktest.tcl > /dev/mpeg0v

I have tried sending data to the socket, and I get a garbled version of hte video I am sending. I am sending from a windows platform, so may be losing data there. If not then the Tcl script may just be too slow (which is my suspicion.) I will try in a day or so to send from a linux system.

[IWantToShare]

Maybe this is just a pie-in-the-sky suggestion.

Many of us run with one hard drive leaving an IDE connector open. Would it be possible to add a CD-ROM drive to the second connector?

Just think about the possibility of playing a VCD straight into the TiVo. It would need to be de-multiplexed, but the audio/video feeds could be sent straight to the hardware.

[TheDoctor]

A kernel moduled would have to be added with cd support. BUt there is nothing to stop you from formatting making a big ext2 drive with one of the pc boot disks that does have cdrom support and transfering the files to it.

[IWantToShare]

True... But I was thinking about cheap, removable archive media.

How about this as an idea enhancement....

The CDR would contain purely a tystream dump, not a playable VCD. When placed into the CD-ROM drive connected to the TiVo, it would automagically copy the dump into MFS and the show would be restored to the TiVo for normal trick play. The show would be visible in Now Showing, and be played straight from the MFS drive.

This way you could archive (using a PC etc...) and delete off the TiVo, but when you want re-use the archive, you wouldn't need a PC or anything. Just pop the CD-R into the drive and it would copy the stream to MFS. You wouldn't even need to issue a manual command or have a UI.

Multiple CDR's could be used to span larger recordings.

I don't even think that the MPAA would get upset over this because it there is no decoding of the datastream, only doing a personal archive.

Anyone up to helping to convert a CD-ROM drive kernel module for the TiVo?

[Juppers]

You do realize a half hour show at high quality is over 800 megs right? You may want to look at DVD-r instead of CD-r. :)