Tivoserver alpha-release thread

[BTUxNine]

To let more people help out with the debugging of tivoserver, we've decided to try some alpha-testing releases. Keep in mind that these may be less stable, and often contain features that haven't been tested all that well, yet (that's your job ).
If you're just trying to get tivoserver up and running and are looking for support, this really isn't the thread for you. Please see the main support thread.
Alpha releases will be indicated by -a# (starting with 0.4.3-a2)... it's a non-standard scheme, but hey, whatever works.

THE MINGW -a2 port is broken, if you have issues with it, please try the cygwin port before posting.

LATEST RELEASE is v0_4_4-a3, more info in this post

[BTUxNine]

a source tarball and cygwin binary for -a2 should be up on sourceforge (at least within the next 30 minutes, depending on the propagation delay).

we don't really have a changelog, but some of the changes/fixes include:
dynamically resize buffers, added more show info from xml, fixed several ty issues, added limited vob support, better estimates of aspect ratio, added logfile support, and other improvements that I'm too tired to remember.

There is also a mingw port, and should be a binary posted in the near future.

My thanx to drez, rbautch, and others who helped me debug some of the ty and aspect-ratio problems. They went above and beyond the call.

[wsewell]

While BTU has been hard at work fixing bugs and trying to get aspect ratios just right, I've been working (er... uh... playing) with a non-cygwin port (compiled on MinGW for those that care). Along with the alpha release of the cygwin files is a tivoserver-*-setup.exe file, which is an installer for the "real" Windows port.

If you dare to try it out please let me know what you think. It is definitely alpha and I've only checked it on one other computer so it may just catch your PC on fire

When you run this version, you are actually running a little "launcher" program that sits in the task tray, tells you the status of tivoserver, and tries (a few times) to re-run tivoserver if it dies. The "launcher" is called tivoserver.exe and the "real" tivoserver is now called tivoserver_d.exe. This will probably change in the future, as I said this is just alpha.

I'd like to hear about any issues on codec-compatibility here, but only if you've got a file that works on the cygwin version of Tivoserver so we can be sure it's not just an issue with Tivoserver in general. The only codec I couldn't get compiled in was Vorbis.

[VCD_Junky!]

Everything looks good so far with the MinGW build/install. The one feature I found especially useful was that when I tried to play a non-supported AC3 audio encoded video, the TivoServer back-end crashed as usual, but the task tray app was able to restart it automatically before the Tivo UI timed out (at least on my box). The Tivo informed me it could not transfer the file and the TivoServer had recovered by the time it needed to go back to the video list. So essentially, this handles AC3 crashing until the codec can be implemented.

Great work, thanks!

[rbreding]

Just to clarify....is the alpha version the same as the current CVS or 1 step behind CVS ?

[Vegas]

Looking pretty good runing on Core 4

mpg with ac3 5.1 transfered fine, tivoserver transcoded the audio to mp2 stereo and played it perfectly.

Tryed a couple of vobs and found the duration was not calculated correctly.
"American Pie" which is 95 min. long was calculated at 4 min.
It transfered and played the first 4 minutes just fine. At the end of 4 min tivo thought it was still recording and just sat with a black screen. At the same time tivoserver started to buffer the last part to a temp file. The buffer continued to build for about 10 min. before I stoped it.

Initial read at start of tivoserver

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 +  American Pie.vob
Input #0, mpeg, from '/video/movies_comedy/American Pie.vob':
  Duration: 00:04:23.0, start: 0.194500, bitrate: 150177 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0], 29.97 fps: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, 9800 kb/s
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 448 kb/s
  Stream #0.2[0x81]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
  Stream #0.3[0x82]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
stream 0,stream 1,stream 2,stream 3,adjusted AR= 1.77778
AVI2 stats: 720x480, dur=4:23, BR=150177776, Pixel-AR=32/27
        nchunks: 699, nparts: 3
SUCCESS: ( 3408855076 ) -> American Pie :
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

From the terminal

 -------->  Random Magic: '1804289383'NEW TRANSFER
0x00016bb4
0x00016bb2
 Found Magic number: '1804289383'
Found Show By ID: -886112220
AVI2!
0x00000000
Input #0, mpeg, from '/video/movies_comedy/American Pie.vob':
  Duration: 00:04:23.0, start: 0.194500, bitrate: 150177 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0], 29.97 fps: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, 9800 kb/s
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 448 kb/s
  Stream #0.2[0x81]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
  Stream #0.3[0x82]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
stream 0,stream 1,stream 2,stream 3,adjusted AR= 1.77778
AVI2 stats: 720x480, dur=4:23, BR=150177776, Pixel-AR=32/27
        nchunks: 699, nparts: 3
Input #0, mpeg, from '/video/movies_comedy/American Pie.vob':
  Duration: 00:04:23.0, start: 0.194500, bitrate: 150177 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0], 29.97 fps: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, 9800 kb/s
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 448 kb/s
  Stream #0.2[0x81]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
  Stream #0.3[0x82]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
        newh= 480, Padding= 0, ar= 1.77778
Output #0, mp2, to 'tmp.m2a':
  Stream #0.0: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
Output #1, mpeg2video, to 'tmp.m2v':
  Stream #1.0,   nan fps: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, q=2-31, 2500 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.0 -> #1.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
Proceeding with xfer
          ** Beginning transfer of show: American Pie
About to Load Header
  --> Loading Header 0 from /video/movies_comedy/American Pie.vob
 ---------------------
 | Num Records = 349
 | Begin       = 0
 | End         = 1
 ---------------------
Loaded Header OK
Closing Connection 140
Record   64/349, Part 1/3, 9%, 958K/s  Avg=958K/s  ETA 1:24   0x00000000
Record  134/349, Part 1/3, 19%, 967K/s  Avg=967K/s  ETA 1:14   Adding Tivo: Bar (1510000A051A520)
Record  348/349, Part 1/3, 49%, 952K/s  Avg=960K/s  ETA 0:47   About to Load Header
  --> Loading Header 1 from /video/movies_comedy/American Pie.vob
 ---------------------
 | Num Records = 350
 | Begin       = 134300
 | End         = 134301
 ---------------------
Loaded Header OK
Record  348/350, Part 2/3, 102%, 944K/s  Avg=961K/s  ETA 0:-2   About to Load Header
  --> Loading Header 2 from /video/movies_comedy/American Pie.vob
Buffering last part to temporary file /home/jowens/.tivoserver/lastpart.tmp
...............................................................................................
.[Snip].........................................
.........................[Stoped the transfer here]Closing Connection 141
....[temp file continued to build]...........................................................................................
......................................................................[killed tivoserver]Deleting AVI2---
.Closed Audio Buffer
Closed Video Buffer
Segmentation fault
[jowens@Royal1 tivoserver]$

I played this same vob with WinDVD and it displayed a duration of 2hr. 46min.
With Xine the duration showed 65min.
Doesn't seem anyone has much luck with vob duration.

Note: with WinDVD & Xine while the duration is wrong they both play the whole file.

Vegas

[wsewell]

Just to clarify....is the alpha version the same as the current CVS or 1 step behind CVS ?

The alpha version is what was in CVS last night. Tho, there are a few minor MinGW changes that I didn't commit to CVS when I built the binary. The Cygwin alpha is == CVS (BTU correct me if I'm wrong).

[vectorite]

Just tried the windows installer, couldn't get it to work, find log attached. Seems that it doesn't recognise the ty files in my app. data/video folder. So I thought I'd replace tivoserver_d.exe to with tivoserver.exe renamed tiviserver_d.exe and aded the cygwin1 dll. When I then re-ran tivoserver it did bring up the gycwin version and report it as running, It came up looking normal and was able to xfer files to tivo.

I'm using WXP SP2 hope that helps

Andy

[whitepelican]

mpg with ac3 5.1 transfered fine, tivoserver transcoded the audio to mp2 stereo and played it perfectly.

Is this really what is supposed to occur? The AC3 audio is going to be transcoded to stereo instead of being kept intact?

[digimaster1964]

Another useless software

[rbreding]

Another useless software

Maybe if you could spell better and explain what you are talking about someone could understand you. Otherwise don't bother cluttering up the thread.

[Pendragn]

I noticed with this version I lost my grouping on the TiVo. With the same settings.cfg file 0.4.0 gives me folders for each directory that I'm sharing. 0.4.3 does not. Any ideas what is different?

tk

[BTUxNine]

Is this really what is supposed to occur? The AC3 audio is going to be transcoded to stereo instead of being kept intact?

eventually (soon, hopefully), ac3 will be copied intact, but for now, it transcodes to mp2. -- It's near the top of the feature list we're working on (or least that *I* am working on).

re: durations, yes, that's an inherent problem with mpegs and vobs... it may take us quite a while to get a functional workaround, but it IS being worked on.

[whitepelican]

Been doing some testing. One question: Is this MingW version even based on the same source as the Cygwin -a2 version? They seem to work completely different. I've tried them both with a few Divx/Xvid files, some of which included AC3 audio.

In MingW version:
1) Files in subfolders don't even load.
2) Filenames look the same as the 0.43 version.
3) Computer catches on fire when trying to load Xvid with AC3 audio.

In Cygwin version:
1) Files in subfolders load correctly.
2) Filenames have me a bit baffled.
3) No fires at all with AC3 audio. In fact, it works perfectly.

[BTUxNine]

the MinGW build definitely has issues... weston is the one working on that, and I really don't know how far off the codebase is from CVS.

re: filenames, weston put in code that removes identical prefix/suffix within a directory