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.