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TiVo Video Download and Playback with Fedora

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Submitted by dale on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 10:27
in

After having my Sony Sat T-60 Series 1 DirecTiVo for about 8 years, I'm finally upgrading to a TiVo HD. It should be here soon, so in the meantime I need to do some research and prepare my home network for the addition.

To leverage my Mythdora MythTV box I want to support the following in Linux:

  • Download video from TiVo to my MythTV
  • Play video on the TiVo from my MythTV

Let's see how to do that...

Downloading Video from TiVo

The kmttg perl-Tk script automates the downloading, decrypting, and transcoding of videos directly from the TiVo. It also removes the commercials.

The author only provides a .zip, so I've created a kmtg RPM. It's only partially tested so far.

Kmttg utilizes a couple of other packages, which aren't readily available in Fedora, to do the actual work.

tivodecode - For decrypting .TiVo files to .mpg.
There was a Mandriva RPM available, but I started working on a Fedora RPM.
comskip or comskip - For automated commercial detection.
However, this tool is windows-based. Apparently it will work in Wine.

Alternatively, MythTV flags commercials and it is possible to remove commercials as well.

Uploading Video to TiVo

I don't really care about actually uploading video into the TiVo, but I want to play my DVDs from my fileserver. It looks like pyTivo is the solution for that. I haven't started playing with that yet.

I'll update this posting as I make progress.

Comments

Tested on Fedora 13

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Submitted by dale on Wed, 06/09/2010 - 01:30.

There is a much newer version of kmttg out now, but I just did the following with success using the same old RPMs on Fedora 13 and a Tivo Priemere XL. I'll update the RPMs some day.

Then install the 2 RPMs I created along with any necessary dependencies. You have to disable gpgcheck since my RPMs are not signed. Perhaps you want to install the deps first without this option.