MovieLoader: HME meets MFS_FTP

[darrin75]

First off, the creator of Movieloader, gfb107, no longer supports it after spending many years developing it and then moving on to other things. It just wasn't a priority for him to add conversion. Nobody else has picked up the code and it hasn't seen active development for years. It's still quite useful, though.

Mostly Movieloader is for moving tivo files around. I use it mainly for managing moving files between two different TiVos, so conversion on the fly wouldn't help me. Certainly if you move files to a disk on your PC conversion has its uses, but when I need to do that I just use tytompg-1.1. It's fast and it has minimal loss of quality (basically it just removes the extra stuff TiVo added to mpeg-2). While mpeg-2 isn't the most compact video codec, storage is cheap these days and most devices still play mpeg-2.

I never could get movieloader to work between tivos anyway? I am running 6.4a Dsr708.

[darrin75]

Ok heres what I want to do to get these to work with movieloader and tivoserver, If tivoserver serves up and transcodes on its own, why cant movieloader see tivoserver as another TiVo?

[wundernaut]

I never could get movieloader to work between tivos anyway? I am running 6.4a Dsr708.

First, some basics. Is your java up to date on the PC you are running MovieLoader on? Are you running mfs_ftp on each TiVo you want to transfer files between? Running a ftp program on your PC, can you ftp into the mfs_ftp on each TiVo (this is just a test to make sure mfs_ftp is working)? Are you sure your MovieLoader.properties file is properly configured? For example, you should have a line something like "mytivo=ftp://192.168.1.20" (using whatever IP address is your TiVo) for each TiVo.

[wundernaut]

Ok heres what I want to do to get these to work with movieloader and tivoserver, If tivoserver serves up and transcodes on its own, why cant movieloader see tivoserver as another TiVo?

MovieLoader is just a fancy front-end for mfs_ftp that lets you control mfs_ftp from your TiVo (as long as it is running HME). Underneath the interface, it's basically just a ftp client program no different than any other ftp client program you run on your computer. I'm never run tivoserver nor am very familiar with it, but unless it provides a ftp server interface mfs_ftp can't see it. That means MovieLoader can't see it either.

[darrin75]

MovieLoader is just a fancy front-end for mfs_ftp that lets you control mfs_ftp from your TiVo (as long as it is running HME). Underneath the interface, it's basically just a ftp client program no different than any other ftp client program you run on your computer. I'm never run tivoserver nor am very familiar with it, but unless it provides a ftp server interface mfs_ftp can 't see it. That means MovieLoader can't see it either.

Finally got evrything working, it does a good job considering its not been worked on in a while. Its been a while since i have fooled with this stuff, i guess going to 6.4a got me off the couch and back figuring stuff out all over again.

[wundernaut]

Finally got evrything working, it does a good job considering its not been worked on in a while. Its been a while since i have fooled with this stuff, i guess going to 6.4a got me off the couch and back figuring stuff out all over again.

That's great!

One nice feature you or others may not be aware of: If you have an old series 1 TiVo or any TiVo that doesn't support HME, you can still put them in your MovieLoader.properties file and transfer files with other TiVos or save them to an external disk. That's because they still can run mfs_ftp. While you can't run the MovieLoader interface from such TiVos, it's still useful to transfer files between them.

I've found that a series 1 file (at least in .tmf form) can be transferred to a series 2 DTiVo and viewed, and a series 2 DTiVo file can be transferred and viewed on a series 1. The only hiccup is that the backwards and forwards skip functions don't always work well when viewing a series 1 file on a series 2 DTiVo (but the fast forward and backwards functions still work).

[darrin75]

Any way to not have the file extentions show up on the transfer name? Also anyway to rename TiVo menu where it says music & Photos and more, change it to Movieloader???

[wundernaut]

Any way to not have the file extentions show up on the transfer name? Also anyway to rename TiVo menu where it says music & Photos and more, change it to Movieloader???

For the file extensions, probably if you know java. The MovieLoader.jar file contains the source code (just open it up with winzip or any other zip utility). I don't know of any way to rename the TiVo menu, AFAIK nobody ever cracked how TiVo did its onscreen displays.

[darrin75]

I figured out how to change the title in the TiVo menu with hex editor, movieloader works fine, but I tried Galleon 2.5.5 out and it does not work on windows 7. Unless someone knows why?

[wundernaut]

I figured out how to change the title in the TiVo menu with hex editor, movieloader works fine, but I tried Galleon 2.5.5 out and it does not work on windows 7. Unless someone knows why?

Sorry, I don't know about Galleon, but which file did you edit to change the menu? Did you find it by greping binary files for the ASCII?

[darrin75]

Sorry, I don't know about Galleon, but which file did you edit to change the menu? Did you find it by greping binary files for the ASCII?

I just useda hex editor on the tivocentrel.brf file. But you have to becareful what u edit or it will cause a reboot loop. Mine now says Movies & Home Videos