Tivo video extraction

well, the one benefit of being unemployed is finally having time to catch up on geek projects. a few months ago, i bought a turbonet card for my tivo. i plan on getting it installed this afternoon, and then using my broadband connection for service updates.

i'm also interested in extracting shows, and converting them to DivX format stored on a file server. has anyone undertaken this project lately? i've spent a little time browsing some forums, and the information out there is sketchy at best. if anyone has some tips, lessons learned, etc. that could help point me in the right direction, i'd appreciate it.

FWIW, i have an original philips series 1 standalone recorder (HDR112), upgraded a couple years ago with an 80GB drive. i have machines running win2k, linux, and freebsd at my disposal to do the conversion work as necessary.

thanks!
--dan.

I have had great success extracting video from my TiVo. The DealDatabase forums have a lot of good information on the subject.

I am currently using TyTool Alpha5 (I think) at the moment. I have been using it for months and it works great. There may be a newer version, but since it works I haven't bothered to check.

There was a good guide on the net about using TyTool, but it seems to have been taken down. Luckily, I copied it to my webserver just in case that were to happen. I will send you a PM with the URL (don't want to make public for legal reasons).

very cool, thanks!

--dan.

As far as installing Tivonet goes there's a newbie guide here that I found helpful. What I found especially noteworthy was the advice for installation on both the active and inactive partition. Tivo switches partition after an official SW upgrade and if there's a problem it will switch back to the old partition and keep running. By installing the software on both you retain functionality post-upgrade.

There's some additional tools on pvrhack that you might want to play with, tivo-bin (IIRC) is a useful collection of linux tools you may find handy.

FWIW, I purposefully chose not to get listings via Tivonet and instead stay using the telephone line. My reasoning was that I couldn't see any appreciable gain doing it that way and for my troubles I'd need to ensure Tivo stayed hooked up to the web (in other words 'more to go wrong'!).

FWIW, I purposefully chose not to get listings via Tivonet and instead stay using the telephone line.

Just to offer another point of view... Not everyone is blessed with a local call-in number. There are no numbers that are a local call to me. Before I had TurboNet, I had the Tivos dialing out of state numbers since interstate long distance is cheaper for me than intrastate long distance.

Another pro for updating over the web... My parents have 5 TiVo boxen in their house. There is only 1 phone number in the house. Often, while talking on the phone, you will hear clicks from one of the TiVos attempting to dial-out. Eventually I will have them all on the network to avoid that crap.

I also have no phone line near my Tivo, and those wireless phone jacks don't work.