Playing downloaded streams from your
TiVo is just one way to use Wingert's TiVo MPlayer
. The whole
reason he extended the original MPlayer was to enable you to stream
videos right from your TiVo to your PC.
You'll need a program
called vserver to pull off this hack. Download
http://tivo-mplayer.sourceforge.net/releases/vserver-1.2.tar.gz
and unpack the archive. Inside, you'll find a whole
slew of files. Look for a binary called
vserver-ppc-s1-exec. Move and rename the file to
/var/hack/bin/vserver on your TiVo. Start it up:
bash-2.02# ./vserver
waiting for connections on port 8074
Launch MPlayer as in
the previous hack, only this time passing it the URL
tivo://tivo_ip_address/list,
replacing tivo_ip_address with the IP
address of your TiVo . That magical tivo URL handler up front
(the tivo:// bit) makes sure that MPlayer talks to
the vserver on the right port with the right
protocol. The list bit, as you might imagine,
requests a list of available programming. Here, I'm
asking my TiVo (at IP address 192.168.0.3) for its Now
Showing list:
C:\Program Files\mplayer> mplayer -quiet -cache 8192 [RETURN]
tivo:// 192.168.0.3/1662160
Playing tivo://tivo/list
Listing streams in /Recording/NowShowingByTitle
[1662160][3][24][Day 2: 7:00 - 8:00AM]
[1651148][3][24][Day 2: 6:00 - 7:00AM]
[1636997][3][24][Day 2: 5:00 - 6:00AM]
[1623225][3][24][Day 2: 4:00 - 5:00AM]
[1220239][13][9/11][(null)]
[1670974][2][ABC World News Tonig][(null)]
[700897][4][The Armenians: A Sto][(null)]
[1684169][2][Coming Attractions][(null)]
[1651146][5][Dawson's Creek][All Good Things ... Must Come to an End]
...
Those
numbers in the first column are the filesystem IDs (FSIDs) for the
recorded streams, TiVo's way of indexing recorded
videos. They're also used by
vserver to select a show to stream:
C:\Program Files\mplayer> mplayer tivo://192.168.0.3/1662160
And up comes the final episode of 24. To stop
playback and quit MPlayer, press Control-C on
the command line. mplayer is unfortunately quite
computationally intensive, so the other flags on the command line are
about lessing the load on your PC. -quiet
supresses mplayer's output on
the command line, giving your PC more computational cycles for the
video. The -cache line asks your PC to cache 8 MB
of video data at all times while it is playing to protect your PC
against the unpredictability of networks
With
vserver running, you also can extract
ty streams directly from TiVo using mplayer
. On the command
line, invoke mplayer, specifying an output file
and the FSID of the stream you want to extract:
$ mplayer -dumpfile out.ty -dumpstream tivo://192.168.0.3/1692481
When you're done,
don't forget to also kill the
vserver process on your TiVo with a Control-C.
