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Episode: 1013
Title: HPR1013: Saving Programs From TiVo
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1013/hpr1013.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:24:02
---
Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to the latest program.
I want to do something a little bit different.
I just finished a long series called Freedom is Not Free, and I thought that was important
stuff to talk about, but I want to do something a little bit different today, talk about
something maybe a little more technical than what I did before.
And that is, I want to talk about how you can save programs from Tivo.
My wife and I both love Tivo, and I know I've thought about Myth TV, and I may go there
at some point, but I'm actually pretty happy with Tivo right now.
And we record programs, it's fact in my household, we have his and her setups.
She has her own television, Tivo, DVD player, what have you, and I have mine.
So I record programs of various kinds, and some of them I want to keep, for future reference.
One of the things that I really enjoy are great performances at the Met, where they broadcast
operas from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and I happen to be a fan of that.
And I would love to keep those, well, if I just left them on Tivo, the hard drive there
does fill up, so that's not really a very good option.
So what I found I needed to do was find some way to get the programs off of Tivo, get
them onto my hard drive, and figure out what to do.
And I started looking around, and Tivo does have a program, if you're on windows that you
could use, it's the Tivo to go desktop program, and that allows you to download the stuff,
and you can buy that program from Tivo.
And they have an arrangement with Roxio, that the Roxio DVD recorder will take those files,
and the thing I need to explain to you is that the files are essentially MPG, but they've
got some proprietary stuff, DRM basically, that means you can't just treat it as an ordinary
MPG file and go with it, but Roxio knows how to handle that.
And on windows, that's a reasonable way to go, I suppose, but I don't really use windows
all that much.
So what are the options if you have a Linux setup and you would like to keep these files?
And I did a little looking around, and I think I have the answer now.
So I want to explain what you need to do to take files off of your Tivo, convert them,
edit them, save them, burn them to a DVD, whatever it is that you want to do.
So that's really the topic of this program.
Now the first thing I want to do is just mention that there is this program called KMTTG.
And I've put all of the links for this and for every other program that I mentioned.
The links are all in the show notes, so please don't worry if you can't get it out of
what I'm saying here, they will all be there.
So KMTTG, and if you want to find it, it's at http colon slash slash code dot google dot com
slash p slash KMTTG.
Again, all of this stuff is in the show notes, so don't worry about it.
So if you download this program, really all you have to do, you don't even install it
so much as you just, you know, it's a tarball and you just expand it into a directory.
I've got it in my home directory, my kabuntu box, and then you can just run it from there.
Just make sure that you've marked the file KMTTG as executable, and it'll run.
Well it'll run when you've got all the pieces in place.
That's the other thing about this.
You cannot run this without first having the Java runtime environment, okay?
Now, generally speaking, I suggest that if you're going to get something like the Java
runtime environment, I prefer to do it from the repository for my distro.
Now mine is kabuntu, but whatever your distro is, chances are they've got Java runtime
environment in the repositories there.
And the reason I recommend that is that it's likely to work a little bit better if there
are any changes that needed to be made to make it work with your particular distro that
should already have happened, so that kind of makes sense.
So that's a dependency for KMTTG.
Now if it was actually packaged the way that Linux programs are normally packaged by
the different distros that would have been taken care of, but as I said, this isn't
really packaged.
It's just this tarball you expand and then you run.
So what you need to know is install the Java runtime environment first.
So that's the first thing you have to do.
Second thing, at the same site that has KMTTG, there is a helper program called TVO decode,
and you need to download that.
TVO decode is important because remember what I said before about TVO files have a little
bit of proprietary stuff in the file format that makes them unreadable to normal video
players and CD burners, DVD burners, what have you.
So what you need to do is you need to transcode from the TVO format into a standard format.
And that's what TVO decode is for.
Now say you can download TVO decode from the same page, same site as KMTTG, it's a great
little helper program, but it is source code only.
And what that means is you're going to have to download the source code and compile
it and install it.
Now that's not that big a deal.
Most people who have been running Linux for a while have done this many times.
But it is basically you have to do .slash configure, then make, then make install.
And I've got some stuff on my website about that, or just look it up on any, there's
a ton of different sites that explain how to do it.
You can call it the three step dance or whatever you want to call it, .slash configure, make,
install, very, very simple.
And then once you do that, well, you can now download and convert all of the programs
that are on your TVO.
Now the next thing that I want to talk about is the various helper programs.
What KMTTG is doing is basically treating your TVO box like a remote server and logging
into it and grabbing the files.
And it uses curl, c-u-r-l.
It's a standard Linux program that is used to grab things over the internet.
So you can probably, I would again say, go to your distros repository, whatever that is,
and grab curl and install it.
During the KMTTG, when you open it up, there's a place that you can configure that program.
And when you configure it, it'll want to know, where do I find this?
So you can put the path to curl in there.
Couple of other helper programs that you will definitely want to have.
One is M&CODER, M-E-N-C-O-D-E-R.
The other is FFMPEG, F-F-M-P-E-G.
Now chances are that FFMPEG, you may well have that installed already.
You might also have M&CODER installed already.
But if not, again, go to the repository for your distro, that's really, I think, the best
way for most people to do that.
And the reason you want to have those is that's going to allow you to basically transcode
the T-Vo decode is going to remove the T-Vo special stuff, but you may want to transcode
it into some other kind of file format.
This would give you an opportunity to do some of that.
And KMTTG can do some of that as part of the download if it can make use of these other
kind of helper programs.
Another helper program I want to mention is Handbreak.
That's it, HTTP, colon slash slash h-a-n-d-b-r-a-k-e dot f-r slash d-o-n-l-o-a-d-s dot php.
Handbreak.fr, it's a French site, slash downloads dot php.
The reason you want to have Handbreak, it's not absolutely essential, it depends on what
you want to do.
The Handbreak is a program that it specializes in transcoding video files into formats
that'll play on mobile devices.
So your smartphone, your tablet, things like that, it really it's specialized for doing
that.
So that's a good, if you wanted to put something on a tablet or a smartphone, I think Handbreak
would be a very handy way to do that.
And so I would suggest you download that.
You may find that it gives, I know for Ubuntu, it mentions the Debian repository, I've had
problems with it.
I don't know if the problems are just me.
I once wrote to the maintainer and he sort of asked me a question, I answered the question
and I never heard anything from him, so you know, I don't know.
As it turns out, I don't actually need to have Handbreak, so I decided I could live
without it.
Another program, that the last two helper programs I'm going to mention are Windows Only.
Now KMTTG could be run as a Windows program, I, you know, and TVO decode, I'm not exactly
sure how you start dealing with all of the stuff that has to be compiled or getting
out of repositories.
But these, these last two things are Windows programs, which means you're going to have
to run them with wine if you want to use them.
And the first one I'm going to mention is Com Skip, and that's for skipping commercials.
And it also has a program that, called Com Clean, that will actually delete the commercials
out of a file, and that's all part of that.
So that is http colon slash slash www dot K-A-S-H-O-E-K dot com slash C-O-M-S-K-I-P.
And so you can get the program there, as I say, you're going to have to set it up to run
with wine.
That's a little additional wrinkle.
And then finally I'm going to mention something called Atomic Parsley, which is at http colon
slash slash AtomicParsley dot source forge dot net.
And that is a program that basically is for writing meta tags, and it says that it writes
it in the iTunes format.
It's not something I particularly care a whole lot about, so I'm just mentioning that
it's there.
Now let's say you want to run KMTTG.
Well, that's not hard to do.
As I said, you would have expanded, untard all of this into a directory, minus in my home
directory, just slash KMTTG.
And there is a program, there, it's just called KMTTG, no file extension or anything.
And if that's your executable, so if you haven't already done so, make sure you mark it
as an executable file, and then just run it, and that's going to come up.
And it's going to give you a screen.
And if you take a look at the file menu, there's an option that says configure.
And so you can get into the configure, there's a lot of stuff going on in there.
But a couple of things I want to mention, programs.
So I mentioned curl, all right?
So on the programs tab, you would go to put in the path, which on mine is slash usr slash
bin slash curl, tvo decode, all right?
So on mine, that's slash home slash Kevin, it's my actual name, slash KMTTG slash tvo decode
slash emin coder slash usr slash bin slash emin coder, ffm peg slash usr slash bin slash
ffm peg, et cetera.
Now it will, when you install KMTTG, it'll put in the most common path.
And if you then try and save your configuration, and there's something not wrong, it's going
to say, hey, there's some errors.
Here.
So for instance, on mine, I open it up, I take a look at this, and I say, okay, fine, I'm
finished configuring this, and I get two errors.
Well they're highlighted.
One of them is handbrake, because I don't have handbrake installed.
Any other is atomic parsley, because I don't have atomic parsley installed.
So it's looking for those where it thinks it would be, but it's not finding that.
So to proceed to save settings anyway, yeah, sure, save settings anyway.
Another thing you need to take a look at, the fourth tab in is tvo's.
Now it used to be harder, but now they've gotten to the point where they can kind of search
the network, and I have a home network, and I've got both my tvo and my wife's, and so
it'll just take a look on the network and come back and say, hey, you know, here's this
DVR on the network, and it's got an IP address, 192.168.1.16, and yeah, it sounds about right.
Now if you could put in this stuff manually, but I've had excellent luck with having it
just search for it.
It also has the ability to search using Bonjour, which is Apple's way of doing network searching.
Tvo Beacon is another thing, so there's a few things you can do.
So that's one of the options you have.
So once you've got it configured, what happens?
Now you go to your, it'll put a tab up like about four lines down with the name of that DVR,
and so it'll go to that DVR, you know, give it a few seconds, and it will start pulling
down program information.
So I can see all of these different programs, and oh, lookie, live from Lincoln Center,
and a Fleming at the Penthouse, oh, I've got to get that one.
So all I have to do is click on that line to highlight it, and then say, start jobs,
which is a green button in the upper left, and I click on it, and by golly, it's going
to start downloading it.
And what I am going to wind up with when it downloads is a file in my input directory
that is just a plain MPG file, because that's really the underlying format for T-Pro.
Okay, so now I've got this file there that's an MPG file, and I could just say I'm done.
All right, I've downloaded it, I got rid of the DRM or whatever you want to call it
that was messing up the file format.
It's now playable with any video player, so I could use VLC or Dragon Player or whatever
it is that I particularly like to use for all of my videos.
However, you might want to do a little bit more.
There are two things that you might want to consider at this point.
One of them is file size, okay?
A lot of these things end up being like 10 to 15 gigabytes in size.
Now it may depend on whether you're recording something that was in HD to begin with, because
those HD files, you know, if something is a 1080p program to begin with, and it's an
hour and a half, two hours long, you're going to get an insanely large file size.
So that's one of the issues.
The other issue is you're just getting the start and stop of the program as it was recorded.
So let's say a program is some of the operas that I like might be two hours and 15 minutes,
let us say.
There's no 15 minutes kind of setting, so Tivo would have recorded two and a half hours
on that.
I don't need the last 15 minutes of, you know, promos for other programs, et cetera, et cetera.
So what do I do at that point?
Well, that's where I bring up a program.
Now there are a number of ones that can do this.
A video editor that I like is called Kden Live, K-D-E-N-L-I-V-E.
Now that's, as you might guess from the name, is kind of a part of K-D-E in some sense.
And you can get it either from here, again, the repository of your distro or HTTP colon slash
slash www.kde-N-L-I-V-E.org.
Now the thing I like about it, I've gotten used to it when you want to edit a program
like this, you first have to tell Kden Live, well, what kind of file format resolution should
I expect.
When you're dealing with video, there are a couple of different variables.
Kden is the frame size, so for instance, 1080p, that's 1,920 horizontal pixels by 1,080
vertical pixels.
Another common one that's not quite as detailed is 720, or you can get your standard DVD,
which is like 520 by 480 or something like that, and so on, even down to standard NTSC.
So what will happen is, in Kden Live, when you open it up, there is going to be, and I'm
going to bring that up right now, you're going to have an opportunity to add a program
at a file, and when you do that, it's going to tell you, okay, there's going to be
a window there, and you're going to have to take a little bit of time to get used to
where everything is, but where I have it, it's a window that says project tree, and then
at the end of a bar that you could type in, there's something that looks like a little
bit of film with a green plus above it, and that's add clip, so I can say add clip, and
then go to my KMTTG slash input directory, and select one of the files that I downloaded.
And when I do that, it's going to pop up something that's probably going to say, oh, this
won't fit the format you've selected, because you're in, for instance, right now, if I
just open it, NTSC, and so it's going to say, well, this is an NTSC, this is HD, it's
said 1920 by 1080, this won't work.
So what I'll do is say fine, and I'll just click the new button on the upper left, and
now when I do that, I can say select a profile, I can go into profile, and see, yeah, here
we go, HD, 1080p.
So that's the frame size.
The other thing, the other variable is the frames per second, or FPS.
How many frames per second is this video?
And again, the standard in the United States, NTSC is a US one, would be 29.97 frames per
second.
The same, they just rounded up to 30.
Well, neither the timer or the place for me, I knew the answer once, I don't remember
it now, but there are, that's for broadcast television, right?
When you're dealing with HD, with digital television, frames per second could be almost
anything, they really don't care.
I would say get as close as you reasonably can on that, and don't worry, I haven't had
any problems, if I selected 30 frames per second, and the original was 35 or 40, you know,
a Kaden Live as part of the transcoding process, we'll just sort of figure out how to delete
unneeded frames, and what I wind up with is fine.
So what you do is you pull that in by adding a clip, and then drag it down, because under
that project tree there's going to be something that says video one, and NTSC, you could have
multiple tracks and edit them together, this is a very powerful program.
We're just doing something very simple here, so all we have to do is drag the file down
to video one, and put it in there.
And then at the very bottom you're going to see some buttons.
One of them is the Razer tool, another is the Spacer tool, and then there's a slider
that you can move back and forth that is going to either expand or shrink the amount of
data in the window at any one time, and if you move it all the way to the right, then
it's like zooming in as much as possible until you can actually see individual frames.
If you go all the way to the left, then it's like zooming out, and then you can't see
individual frames, but you can move around, perhaps a little more easily.
And so with the video dragged down into the video one, all I have to do is use the pointer,
the selection tool, and start dragging the marker until I get to a place where I want
to make a cut.
And then at that point I go click on the Razer tool, and go make the cut, and then if
I'm deleting something, just click on it with the selection tool, and it will be highlighted
in red, and delete it.
Then I can use the Spacer tool to basically move the file over to get rid of that blank
spot, because I don't want to create a file that has two minutes of blank, that really sucks.
So the Spacer tool lets me drag the whole video over to cover up the blank spot.
Now one of the things that I find helpful when I'm editing is that slider for the zoom
level, when I get to where I think I want to make a cut, I start moving the slider over
to the right, so I can zoom in more and more until I can get just to the frame that I want
to make the cut at.
So it can really be that precise, and say I want to cut at this precise frame, it's
30 frames per second, you know, that's a pretty high degree of control.
So you know, just play around with it.
Now if you don't want to use Kaden Live, the PTV is another one, P-I-T-I-V-I, I think
that's more commonly used by some of the people on the GNOME side, you know, there's other
ones out there.
This is what I use, and I'm used to it, and you know, it seems to work pretty well for
me, and after all, what else is there in life.
And once you have finished editing the file, the last thing you're going to want to do
is you're going to want to, sorry, bring this up again, you're going to want to render
it, and there's a button that says render.
And when you render it, you're going to have a number of different options here.
And you might want to check those out.
You know, if you're going to burn a DVD, then you would want to select a format that is
good for DVD, and that would be an MPEG2, because that's the format that DVD uses.
Now I used to do that, I don't so much anymore, the DVDs start piling up after a while.
And one of the things that I was listening to a podcast the other day by someone who
was talking about how we've reached the point where no one will ever delete anything,
because hard drive capacities just keep going up and up.
So what I've tended to do now when I render is to simply select a format, and I tend to use
XVID, XVID 4 is what is available to me here.
And by the way, if you don't have all of these formats, what you might need to do is
take a look at adding some of the codecs that you may not already have.
But I can select the bitrate, and the bitrate is for video.
And that's the only one I bother with.
The audio is already set to 128 on my XVID.
For video, if what I have is an HD file to begin with, I'll set the video to 4000.
If it was just a normal TV, then I would set it to 2000.
And for me that works out okay.
There's a trade-off always between bitrate and file size.
The higher the bitrate, you're going to get more detailed data, but the file size is going to be bigger.
And what I tend to find is with my HD, if I have it set to 4000.
If I stand up a footer to away from the TV, I can see the difference.
But why would I stand a footer to from the TV?
Normally, I'm sitting 6, 8, 10 feet away from the TV.
And in a case like that, no, I can't see the difference.
So I have larger file size, but that's one of the things you get to decide for yourself.
So pick the file size, figure out what you want to do with it.
And I think at this point, I have told you pretty much everything I do about all of this.
So I want to leave you with one more.
Just a reminder here, the Ohio Linux Fest is looking for speakers.
We would love to have you come and do a talk for us.
So I will make sure that we have something in the show notes.
Show notes about that for our, it's at OhioLinux.org.
And I'll put the URL there.
We're looking for all kinds of talks from all kinds of people.
They can be beginner talks. They can be advanced or somewhere in the middle.
And we would love to have talks on anything involving free and open source software of various kinds, free hardware, accessibility, I mean, you name it.
So I'll direct you to a place where you can see all the things that we're interested in doing.
And I'd love to have you submit a proposal for a talk for us.
So this is Ahuka signing off. Thanks.
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