DiVx encoding addin for eTiVo.

[bluewomble]

For a little while, I've been working on a simple eTiVo addin which transcodes into DiVx video, rather than WMV. This is now in a reasonably stable state and at least one other person has managed to get it to work, so I am happy to make the first beta release...

I use it mostly for transcoding video for viewing on my Palm LifeDrive, using the core pocket media player. I have also managed to get the resulting divx files to stream accross my network into my Kiss DP-500 DVD player...

The addin makes use of VSplit (from the TyTool package) to first 'clean' the .ty stream into a proper mpeg video. Then mencoder (part of the mplayer package) transcodes it into DiVx. You will need a working installation of eTiVo, TyTool and mplayer in order to use this addin.

All the documentation and files are here:
http://www.bluewomble.co.uk/mencoder

Please report any issues or questions in this thread... this addin works for me (I have so far transcoded 130 files into DiVx), but your mileage may vary...

BTW: Huge and ovri-wan -- thanks for beta-testing -- you'll need to download TyTool (if you haven't got it already) and replace all the files from the previous version with the new ones...

Cheers,
Ash.

[HUGE]

Looks cool - I will try the new version today.


HUGE

BTW- Is this DIVX 5 or 6?

[broconne]

This is really cool. I would much rather have my archives in divx.

A few things. Not sure if this is worth putting in your FAQ or not.. But if you already have cygwin installed and installed the mencoder that is linked on your site you have to afterwords go in and delete the cygwin1.dll and replace it with the version in your /cygwin/bin directory. Otherwise cygwin will complain.

I did notice one problem while using this tool. The vsplit part hangs on large files. I have a 6 GB ty file and during the vsplit part it creates 3 GB or so of the .mpeg file on seems to just hang.

If I take the command from the log file and run it manually it runs until completion. Not sure if when you are shelling out the stack size is not large enough or... well really not sure of anything. :-) I will attach my log file in case that helps.

[bluewomble]

Originally Posted by HUGE

BTW- Is this DIVX 5 or 6?

It's MPEG-4 (DivX 4/5)... I don't think mencoder supports DIVX6 yet...
Ash.

[bluewomble]

Originally Posted by broconne

A few things. Not sure if this is worth putting in your FAQ or not.. But if you already have cygwin installed and installed the mencoder that is linked on your site you have to afterwords go in and delete the cygwin1.dll and replace it with the version in your /cygwin/bin directory. Otherwise cygwin will complain.

That's odd... I have both installed... I've compiled my own version of mplayer under cygwin (from cvs), but I've been using the pre-compiled version linked to on my website while testing recently... They both seem to live quite happily on my box, I didn't need to delete or rename anything... I guess it might have something to do with the path variable... (perhaps I have C:\cygwin\bin before "."?). Anyways, thanks for the heads-up, I'll make a note in the docs when I next update them.

I did notice one problem while using this tool. The vsplit part hangs on large files. I have a 6 GB ty file and during the vsplit part it creates 3 GB or so of the .mpeg file on seems to just hang.

If I take the command from the log file and run it manually it runs until completion. Not sure if when you are shelling out the stack size is not large enough or... well really not sure of anything. :-) I will attach my log file in case that helps.

Yes, I noticed this as well with one file yesterday -- it was pretty much the longest recording on my tivo... It's interesting that it runs ok from the command line... Not sure what the problem could be... I'll try to investigate this evening and get back to you...

It's great to hear that you've managed to get it up and running!

Cheers,
Ash.

[mahnamahna81]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!



Im not kidding thank you.

Now if I can just get my 700 mhz Duron machine upgraded, my 2.6 Ghz died recently.

[vinniet]

bluewomble ... This is exactly what I have been looking for. I have been doing it all manual with using Galleon to download and Dr Divx to ecode them to my Palm, then using core player to show them.

I have a few questions. I just got the latest version of eTivo working after some problem with older version with W2K. Has your plug-in test with W2K?

Also I would want to encode in NTSC ... not sure if it matters. Also I am not sure what the resolution of the LifeDrive is but I have Zire 72 and I have to encode with 320 x 320 or something like that. Where do I change that or does it not matter.

Lastly is there a way to delete the .tivo after it sucessfully encodes the show?

I just can not wait to try this. I will report how it goes.

Thanks!

[bluewomble]

I have a few questions. I just got the latest version of eTivo working after some problem with older version with W2K. Has your plug-in test with W2K?

I have no idea, beacause I don;t have access to any Win2K machines... however, I can't think of anything which is Win2K specific, so I strongly suspect that it _will_ work... but of course I can't be sure. It's worth a try let me know how it goes!

Also I would want to encode in NTSC ... not sure if it matters. Also I am not sure what the resolution of the LifeDrive is but I have Zire 72 and I have to encode with 320 x 320 or something like that. Where do I change that or does it not matter.

The palm lifedrive is 480x320 (which makes it rather a nice shape for watching video!). I think that no matter what scale the video is TCPMP scales it accoringly when it's shown on the palms screen... so first off as a test I'd try the default settings. (which I think do encode for PAL). If you need to change things, then you'll need to fiddle with the settings in the DivX_Archive.xml files (etc.) and change the <Flags> and <Flags2> parameters to be something else... I guess you might want to play around with a "-vop scale" parameter, but I'm not sure... have a look in the mplayer docs...

Lastly is there a way to delete the .tivo after it sucessfully encodes the show?

Ah... by this comment, I assume you're using some kind of US tivo2go thingy? Here in the UK, we only have series 1 tivos and they generate .ty files...

I think that Shahar has added some kind of TiVo 2 Go support to eTiVo (you'll need the latest version), but I've no idea how .tivo files differ from .ty files... I suspect that the latest version of eTiVo will delete the .tivo files after it finishes with them, but I've absolutely no idea whether the divx addin will work with .tivo files... I'd be very interested to hear your results. It basically all depends on whether mplayer/mencoder can read them or not...

It might be worth trying a little test for this... get a .tivo file, then run
mplayer show.tivo
if that works, then try
mencoder show.tivo -o show.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc
(or something similar) -- see if you get anything out of it...

Good luck, please let me know how you get on...
Ash.

[vinniet]

Ok it did not work. I think its that the .tivo files are encrypted. The person from eTivo made a utility (Directshow Dump) that ripped out the encryption and turned the file into a regular mpeg2. Problem is I have to figure out how to call his program and is there a way to insert a extra step. If I can do that then I can call Directshow Dump, then your steps.

Let me know.

Thanks!

[bluewomble]

Originally Posted by vinniet

Ok it did not work. I think its that the .tivo files are encrypted. The person from eTivo made a utility (Directshow Dump) that ripped out the encryption and turned the file into a regular mpeg2. Problem is I have to figure out how to call his program and is there a way to insert a extra step. If I can do that then I can call Directshow Dump, then your steps.

Let me know.

Thanks!

Cool.. OK... at the moment, there is no way to add custom steps, but that's probably a good idea anyway... so for .ty files, you'd do:

vsplit
mencoder pass 1
mencoder pass 2

and for .tivo files you'd do

directshow dump,
mencoder pass 1
mencoder pass 2

Should be easy enough to sort out, but unfortunately I'm really busy at the moment... I probably won;t get a chance to look at it until next week.

In the meantime, it would be very helpful if you could let me know the syntax of directshow dump... (is it a command line thing?). Obviously, you'd need to do some testing for me as well as I don;t have any way of generating .tivo files.

I'm tempted to try to make the mencoder addin a generic encoder addin which would simply perform a series of 'custom steps', in this way, we could support .ty and .tivo files, but I could also incorporate conversion of these into mp3 files with lame (useful for radio shows).

If anyone else fancies looking at modifying the code to do this, then please feel free -- the code should be pretty straightforward for anyone with C# skills.

As I said, if you could get back to me with any pointers on how to use directshow dump, then I'll take a look at it next week.

Cheers,
Ash.

[vinniet]

Thanks ... I have a question out to see if anyone knows the command line if any. It has a GUI and it auto looks for files to be converted so I am not sure if it can be called from the command line.

As soon as I get it and test it I will send it along. I am really looking forward to getting this working.

Vinnie

[Masnark]

Originally Posted by vinniet

Thanks ... I have a question out to see if anyone knows the command line if any. It has a GUI and it auto looks for files to be converted so I am not sure if it can be called from the command line.

As soon as I get it and test it I will send it along. I am really looking forward to getting this working.

Vinnie

This should work with no extra steps if both EtiVo and the encoder addin are written properly.

Does the mencoder make any assumption about the file being of the TY type? Or will it work regardless?

I would be interested in seeing the logs (EtiVo.Log, SlaveEncoder.Log and the Addin logs) for the time of the failure.

[bluewomble]

Originally Posted by Masnark

This should work with no extra steps if both EtiVo and the encoder addin are written properly.

Does the mencoder make any assumption about the file being of the TY type? Or will it work regardless?

I would be interested in seeing the logs (EtiVo.Log, SlaveEncoder.Log and the Addin logs) for the time of the failure.

I assume that once eTiVo/DirectShow Dump has done it's thing with the file.tivo file, then the LocalTYFileName property will be set to file.mpeg?

This might cause problems, because the default behavior is to immediately run:

vsplit.exe -m <inputfile> <newvideofile> <newaudiofile>

to 'clean' the ty stream into a proper mpeg... I suspect that if <inputfile> is already a proper mpeg, then vsplit might fall over? I'm not sure really... I've never tried it.

vinniet: To test this, try this version of the mencoder.dll (for testing only)... I've basically just removed the vsplit stuff, so it will just go straight to the encoding phase... assuming it is vsplit causing the problems, then this might work better... let me know how you get on? If this does work, then I'll make the vsplit an optional element in version3...

The testing dll is here: http://www.bluewomble.co.uk/mencoder...coderAddin.dll

If that doesn't work, then perhaps you could send me your encoding logs...


Note that those of you that want a standard install to transcode .ty files (rather then .tivo files) should continute to use the current (beta) 'release' version at http://www.bluewomble.co.uk/mencoder

Cheers,
Ash.

[Masnark]

Originally Posted by bluewomble

I assume that once eTiVo/DirectShow Dump has done it's thing with the file.tivo file, then the LocalTYFileName property will be set to file.mpeg?

That is correct. The LocalTYFileName will be "{...}{...}{etc}.MPG"

[orvi-wan]

hey bluewomble,

your addin has been working great for me, such a cool tool.

I would like to have a few more encoding profiles though (VCD, SVCD & DVD), but I cannot seem to make them work.

I created this VCD.xml and included it as a profile in eTiVo

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<Mencoder>
    <!-- What flags should be passed to mencoder.exe? (on the first or only pass) -->     
    <Flags>-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vrc_buf_size=327:vrc_minrate=1152:vrc_maxrate=1152:vbitrate=1152:keyint=15:acodec=mp2</Flags>

    <!-- What flags should be passed to mencoder.exe? (on the second pass... if there is none, then leave empty) -->     
    <Flags2></Flags2>

    <!-- Where does mencoder.exe live? -->     
    <Path>C:\Program Files\Mplayer\mencoder.exe</Path>
</Mencoder>

For one, it seems to want to create .avi files, how can I make it output .mpg?

When it runs from eTiVo it doesn't create a file, if I run the command from a DOS prompt and change the extension to .mpg it works but I cannot play the file.

Attached is a eTiVo log file.

Any ideas?

Thanks.