HMO for Series 1 SA

[CySurflex]

are there any hacks that allow HMO-type functionality for a series 1?

Maybe its possible to install the 4.x software from a Series 2 on a Series 1 TiVo to get the HMO option?

I've been searching a lot for this but couldn't find anything about that.

[philhu]

yes, look for a dead project called OHM for series 1

Cwingert was actively working on it and then he fell off the earth in May :)

[johnmacd]

are there any hacks that allow HMO-type functionality for a series 1?

What part of HMO are you looking for? Are you looking to transfer shows? If so do a search for mfs_ftp.

If you are looking for something to view pictures or music on, your really out of luck. The S1 doesnt have enough horsepower to do that.

[CySurflex]

What part of HMO are you looking for? Are you looking to transfer shows? If so do a search for mfs_ftp.

If you are looking for something to view pictures or music on, your really out of luck. The S1 doesnt have enough horsepower to do that.

yes - the pictures and music portion of it. It doesn't have enough horsepower to display pictures and play music?

I do have mfs_ftp, vserver, tivowebplus, etc installed - so I am streaming video off the TiVo to other PC's in the house. I thought it would be cool to be able to display photos, music and video from other my PC's harddrive on the TiVo.

[johnmacd]

There is jpegwriter that will display pictures. I've never used it so I have no clue how stable it is. But if you want to try it, you can get it here:
jpegwritter (http://www.allaboutjake.com/tivo/jpegwriter.html)

[cojonesdetoro]

OHM is mostly usable. The problem is that cwingert never supplied full source before he vanished. It mostly works but it has some quirks. It allows playing of MP3 or JPEG files on the Tivo HDD or an NFS/SMB mounted partition. It also is able to stream (not copy, there's a difference) recordings from another Tivo running OHM. There are times where it chokes to the point of needing a reboot to recover but it's not often.

It's too bad that it was abandoned without full source as it was a pretty kewl project. I don't know if cwingert disappeared in real life (car accident or something?... hope not ) or if he just decided to bail from Tivo related stuff.

BTW, I only use it for show streaming and cannot personally atest to MP3/JPG performance. I believe others have said that it works. I have other, more primitive/simple ways of doing that stuff that I find better suits my needs.

[montyshaw]

I don't think cwingert went away. Looking here (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/member.php?userid=276) you can see that his last activity was a little over a week ago. From my reading of the big thread on ohm, I think he stopped development for other reasons, possibly legal? Don't know, and don't want to speculate. I too am very interested in something like ohm, which would be the last piece of the puzzle for me.

]Monty[

[rc3105]

cwingert took several open source components and rolled them into a closed source project - as others have done herebouts :mad:

when the developer community called him on it and asked for full source (as required by the GPL) he packed up his marbles & decided not to play anymore


there are "cracked" versions of the latest build avail (no expiration date) and it's not that much work to re-implement source for the missing components. perhaps someone will finish the project the right way one of these days

*my $ would be on the oztivo peeps as they have the most to gain from s1 HMO functionality - or some intro programming student with time to kill

[montyshaw]

Hi rc3105,

Interesting. This is something I would be interested in working on IF I knew there was someplace I could go and ask dumb questions about the mfs database and post noob TCL questions and there was actually a way to get remote events without stumbling into the 'event bug'. :)

EDIT: I have Unix experience back to '81, only Linux is Tivo, tho, and I've been mostly MS windows for the last 10 yrs. So bash is new to me. 25yr of C, 15 of C++, 0 secs of tcl. Just so my dev experience is understood. I may not actually be qualified to do this. :rolleyes:

]Monty[

[ds2ktj]

I'd be happy to answer newbie tcl questions :)

Dont' have a Series1 though...but I'd still be happy to help.

[rc3105]

Hi rc3105,

Interesting. This is something I would be interested in working on IF I knew there was someplace I could go and ask dumb questions about the mfs database and post noob TCL questions and there was actually a way to get remote events without stumbling into the 'event bug'. :)
]Monty[
start a "finishing ohm" thread in the s1 dev forum (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=50). plenty of people here willing to help, also some good reference info at alt.org/forum (www.alt.org/forum)

[montyshaw]

Hi,

Thanks for the links. I was thinking about this, and I'm not certain that ohm-like functionality is really what I want. For example, I don't care about mp3 playing or pictures. I just want the parts that pertain to using more than one tivo to do conflict resolution and for moving shows around in an unattended automatic way. And Tivo UI access to this functionality has a lower priority to me than the event bug. By that I mean updating a list of shows that I want transfered from one tivo to another thru telnet is fine, if adding tivo ui access means experiencing the event bug. Maybe I should start a thread in the s1 dev forum to see if anyone else is thinking along the same lines.

Thanks again
]Monty[

[rc3105]

Zirak (and others) squashed the event bug a few years back, it's amazing that people keep tripping over that particular issue :rolleyes:

auto conflict resolution and show transfer are easily implemented via tivoweb modules. they can run as a thread and talk to each other without even without bothering to generate a web interface (not that stats/control modules are hard to code)


*I say easily because it's allready been done a couple of times, find a module you like and customize it for your particulars

[montyshaw]

Hi,

I didn't know the event bug had been fixed. I'll have to research that. Of the Tivo ui hacks for transfering shows, cohonesdetoro (love that handle) still reports event bug problems with fxpmerge, and sanderton's SNP doesn't support a sorted 3.0 type now playing. sanderton's solution is pretty slick, tho. I wonder if that wouldn't be a better starting place.

I have been thinking about getting maxwell deamon's cross-compiler libraries set up and taking the tivoftpd source and changing it around to a utility to start the transfer of shows as a cron job running on the tivo. It's C, something down my alley, so to speak.

I never thought of a TivoWeb module. I do use sanderton's conflict resolution module, so that is obviously possible. I'll have to look into that as well. Especially how to run as a thread. It would need to do that. A web server would give you a nice ui as well.

As far as easily implemented as a web module, I'd have to say that's relative to your tcl ability. I can just barely read it, let alone write it. However, I've been avoiding that route, assuming that all tcl would increase the probability of the event bug.

Sigh.. I guess it is time to learn tcl for real.

Thanks for the pointers/ideas
And thanks for mfs_ftp most of all.

]Monty[

[rc3105]

tivosh/tivoapp is the pvr sw that manages mfs, when run as a binary named tivosh it implements a tcl interpreter. the only way to access the proprietary mfs libraries that allocate space for new recordings is using tcl (allocating fsids is possible from c but it's a VERY bad idea for lotsa reasons)

tcl isn't hard, but it is required to acomplish much of anything in the tivo-verse

[cojonesdetoro]

I didn't know the event bug had been fixed. I'll have to research that. Of the Tivo ui hacks for transfering shows, cohonesdetoro
(love that handle)still reports event bug problems with fxpmerge



Zirak fixed the event bug in TCS but TCS a shareware product. I didn't want to use it to front-end my stuff and have to pay for it. I'm just not into paying for software to run on my tivo. (although I have donated before)

I don't really understand how the Tivo processes events so I had to use published example code. All I really need is a way to read remote keystrokes and screen context changes. I never found anyone who posted an example that was proven to bypass the event bug. I don't think TCS lets you monitor screen context changes.

I still use my fxpmerge stuff because it's simple and mostly works. I never got stuarts stuff to work in my environment. I would get crashes/reboots when getting the now playing list. I think it was because of my Tivos had too many recordings.

I also added a lot of stuff to fxpmerge like the ability to turn on mfs_ftp if it's off (on the local and remote tivo). I also have the ability to push and pull recordings from the remote tivo. It suits my purposes and I never really cared to improve and fix it beyond what I need because I think I'm the only person who actually uses it. :-)

[NutKase]

This may not be the place for this but. I've decided to help a friend and learn something about S1's in the process. She's going to give me her
SA S1 (type unknown) to hack on and if I can get involved with this project I will.

I may have some newbie questions (Yippee! I'll be a newbie again) but I'll ask elsewhere.


Bored.


NutKase

[alldeadhomiez]

Zirak fixed the event bug in TCS but TCS a shareware product. I didn't want to use it to front-end my stuff and have to pay for it. I'm just not into paying for software to run on my tivo. (although I have donated before)

I don't really understand how the Tivo processes events so I had to use published example code. All I really need is a way to read remote keystrokes and screen context changes. I never found anyone who posted an example that was proven to bypass the event bug. I don't think TCS lets you monitor screen context changes.

TCS runs a high priority thread (EventServer) that listens for mwstate and remote events, and writes them to a circular buffer in a mempool. This could allow many processes to listen for events without individual connections/disconnections to the (potentially unstable) eventswitcher. It would also work around any queueing bugs that might be present (supposing that the eventswitcher might have problems reading/writing messages that were separated into 2+ "chunks," or that it might gag when it tries to write to a socket whose queue is full because the client is busy).

mempool info (http://alt.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=264&rid=0)
event bug discussion (http://alt.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=292&rid=0)

[montyshaw]

Hi guys,

I've sent off my money to Zirak, and he has offered to help with module creation for TCS. I just read the posts that alldeadhomiez linked to, and I'm definitely going to ride the TCS rails. $15 is a deal and a half to me when you get an extendable event-bug free framework to do Tivo UI code. Also I think Zirak can use the monetary help.

As rc3105 pointed out, the conflict resolution and show movement code is out there in one form or another. Maybe even grab some of cohones fxpmerge code too :)

I'm reading my TCL book getting ready to start something after I finish a readme for a little utility I wrote and get TCS set up.

]Monty[

[NutKase]

Seems to me that we should get some smart people together that haven't even read the TCS code and figure out whatever we want to do then give it to the tivoverse. He's not the only one capable (although I'm certainly not) but I won't pay for TCS. Ever.


NutKase

[Hi8]

Hi, I just want the parts that pertain to using more than one tivo to do conflict resolution and for moving shows around in an unattended automatic way. ]Monty[

you may want to explore the simple option of using 'TyExtract' and a scheduled task running on a PC. I do the same thing you are asking for, by setting a task to run each day (daytime is the least used/active time for my TiVo(s) - nothing much to record) it downloads all the shows from each TiVo that are less than 1 day old. I can then move them to any TiVo I want via MFS_FTP manually - I'm sure I could setup a script to do the same - but it's not a biggy for me, as I can just setup a cue in in my FTP client, and go to work. When I come home it's done!

[montyshaw]

Hi,

Hi8 - It's funny that you bring up TyExtract, as I have used it, but it doesn't support transfering shows. So I wrote my own more simple version (I didn't need the more advanced filtering the TyExtract supports) that does transfers and downloads. As soon as I finish the readme, I'll be posting it.

NutKase - It' your choice to not pay $15 for TCS, and I respect your decision. My justification is that I don't have the time to re-create what Zirak has already done.

]Monty[

[Hi8]

Hi,

Hi8 - It's funny that you bring up TyExtract, as I have used it, but it doesn't support transfering shows. So I wrote my own more simple version (I didn't need the more advanced filtering the TyExtract supports) that does transfers and downloads. As soon as I finish the readme, I'll be posting it.

NutKase - It' your choice to not pay $15 for TCS, and I respect your decision. My justification is that I don't have the time to re-create what Zirak has already done.

]Monty[

When you say it doesn't support transfering shows I'm assuming you mean a direct TiVo <-> TiVo ; and that would be correct. I use my PC as the hub junction for that in that I burn most of the premium channels movies to DVD-RW and don't push those back out to any other TiVo. So it suits my needs perfectly.

I suppose if someone would compile a version for the TiVo you could either do a daily push or pull from each. That would be a pretty neat way of sharing. keeping in mind disc space was not an issue. That's one reason I like the PC step as it does allow me to unload most if not all my shows/movies rather quickly.

I'd be interested in seeing your solution.

[montyshaw]

Hi,

Sorry I wasn't clear. Yes, I mean a direct fxp transfer from one tivo to the other. Both of mine have 140+ hrs so disk space isn't a problem. And I'm not moving everything, just a few select shows. I got the second tivo primarily for the second tuner/encoder, so I can record shows that conflict with season passes on my primary Tivo, and then transfer them over. I am also downloading a few shows to burn to dvd for my son who is at school in Japan.

So I wanted some way to just move some shows and dowload a few. Running it once a day works out fine. I've actually been thinking about writing a similar program for the tivos, since they are the only computers running at home 24/7.

]Monty[

[cojonesdetoro]

Hi,

Sorry I wasn't clear. Yes, I mean a direct fxp transfer from one tivo to the other. [

FXP works fine with mfs_ftp. My fxpermerge script is just a dumb FXP client for mfs_ftp that also privides an on-screen menu and way to get input from the Tivo remote. Any FXP client will work.

BTW: I think mfs_ftp has ways of initiating transfers by hooking directly to the script without having initiate an FXP transfer in the usual way via opening TCP sockets. I don't know exacty how that works but Stuart mentioned that his hack does it that way. Stuart is orders of magnitude above me when it comes to TCL stuff so look at his stuff before looking at my stuff. My code is messy.

I'm a "hacker" in the old sense of the word. I can wield the hatchet, and maybe heal the patient while leaving lots of scarring. A guy like Stuart will use a scalpel and the patient won't have to cover their face in public. :-)

[montyshaw]

Hey cohonesdetoro,

Yes FXP works fine with mfs_ftp. I have a little utility that is doing just that. It runs on my Windows box and does fxp between the 2 tivos. I'll be looking at both your code and Stuarts, because I am a very noob TCL coder, and I want to look at examples of how to do socket stuff from TCL. The goal being a TCS module to initiate a transfer.

The only trick to FXP on the tivos is making sure you do the PASV to the source and then take the ip/port and pass it in a PORT to the destination. That avoids the PASV upload problem. And you have to do a LIST/NLST after a CWD or mfs_ftp will drop the connection when you send a PASV or PORT prior to the RETR/STOR, unlike a normal FTP server. Old news to you, I'm sure. :)

fxpmerge is the kind of functionality I'm wanting to do, I just want to use TCS for the tivo interface part of it. And I want to do/learn some TCL. As far as Stuart's SNP code, he did patch mfs_ftp to get some extra information, but I think the code is basically doing an FXP-type transfer, from my crude understandng of the tcl, which is probably wrong.

My tcl expertise is probably on the order of a 500lb bomb, and there are no survivors. :)

]Monty[

[cojonesdetoro]

Sounds like you already know enough to hit the ground running. The TCL syntax is super easy when compared to perl or C. Pick up Jeff Kegan's book and you'll be coding useful stuff the same day.

in the meantime, I have also found this page handy:

http://tmml.sourceforge.net/doc/tcl/

Although it has no tivo-specific information.

Also look in the tivo itself. There are a bunch of TCL scripts and libraries written by Tivo developers. Another great resource is the Tivoweb source code.

Have fun.

[cojonesdetoro]

Hey cohonesdetoro,
mfs_ftp will drop the connection when you send a PASV or PORT prior to the RETR/STOR, unlike a normal FTP server. Old news to you, I'm sure. :)
]Monty[

Uh, actually.. no. Did I ever tell you my hatchet story?

:-P

[montyshaw]

Hi,

Thanks for that link. Good stuff there. There really is a lot of TCL support out there. I found this nice TCL IDE (http://www.mms-forum.de/ased/asedhome.htm). It's pretty cool for a free IDE for TCL.

]Monty[