stahta01/tivo-archiver

download recordings from a tivo via HMO protocol

PURPOSE

Download tivo recordings marked as 'keep until I delete'. Play them later on Kodi.

Roadmap

I'm no longer a TiVo subscriber, and the API won't return anything unless you have an active account. This means I can no longer test code changes.

SYNOPSIS

I run it via cron.

jeremys@jeremys-desktop> cat /etc/cron.d/tivo-archiver 
@reboot root touch /var/run/tivo-archiver.pid && chown jeremys:jeremys /var/run/tivo-archiver.pid

jeremys@jeremys-desktop> crontab -l | grep tivo-archiver
\*/10 \* \* \* \* /home/jeremys/bin/tivo-archiver > /dev/null 2>&1

Author

Jeremy Singletary [email protected]

Compatible tivo devices

I wrote this to work with my series 2 tivo. It has not been tested on any of the others.

Wishlist

• remove commercials

I've done this a few times by hand using Avidemux, which is works well and is simple enough. It's tedious however, and I don't want to do it by hand for every recording I archive. It results in significant space savings on your drive though, so it'd be a nice bonus. It looked like ffmpeg would be able to identify black frames for me, but I wasn't able to get it to work.

• delete recordings from tivo

It'd be nice to be able to delete a recording from the tivo via HMO protocol after a successful download.

Known Problems

• Tivo network failure during consecutive downloads

I have a series 2 tivo, and it will drop off the network after many consecutive downloads. I'm assuming this is a network driver problem. The tivo still shows it's IP address info as though it were connected, but I no longer see my pyTivo server, and the tivo is not pingable. The tivo will recover after a restart.

While troubleshooting this I removed my tivo branded wireless usb adapter, and my tivo unexpectedly restarted; so you probably don't want to do that while recording is in progress.

To mitigate this issue, I inserted a 10 minute sleep after each download. The problem persists, but is greatly diminished.

• Downloads are slow

This is a limitation of the cpu on series 2 tivos. These units weren't designed for transferring lots of content. From what I've read, the max throughput is 4 Mbs wired or wireless.

In normal use this doesn't really bother me. It's most annoying when I'm coding a new feature and I want the downloads to go faster so I can determine if my code changes work as expected.

Due to this limitation I record at High quality, and not Best quality. I tried Best and then the transfer speed became an annoyance. High quality recording of 1 hour of content weighs in at about 1.6 GB, where Best quality weighs in around 2.6 GB.

• Same show, different region

Being Human has US and UK versions, and I don't see anything in the tivo data to match the region. To work around this problem, you can configure your region in /etc/tivo-archiver.yml. The value for this attribute is used to match the country attribute in the tvrage api.

If a show already has correct episode number in tivo data (instead of the production code or incorrect data), this will be used as a last resort as it tends to be less reliable.