This isn't anything new, but it was new to me. I thought I'd share for those of you with Tivos that might be interested in this.
We've had our Tivos connected to our home wireless network for a long time now, and have used Tivo's Tivotogo package mainly for accessing our music files and photos from our TVs. Yesterday, I started messing around with a few tools to let me play divx/xvid and other videos I have stashed away on my PC on my Tivo (the basic version of Tivotogo only supports mp2 .mpg video). Videora Tivo Converter is a frontend for ffmpeg that quickly & easily converts existing videos to files that will play on your Tivo (some of you may be familiar with Videora's iPod Converter that's been mentioned here before). The process for converting files is relatively quick, depending on what bitrates you encode to. Transcoding a 1 hour video to a 2 Mbps .mpg file takes about 15 minutes, and can be done in the background while you do other stuff. Once converted, the new .mpg files can be moved into your "My Tivo Recordings" folder and they'll be available to transfer to any of your Tivo devices.
This is pretty nice for enjoying videos on the TV rather than being stuck at the desktop PC or having to take the laptop to the den or bedroom.
Some interesting bits about this process:
--If you have 16:9 videos and a 4:3 TV display, you'll need to pad the top & bottom of the output files to get the letterbox effect, otherwise the videos will be stretched to fit the screen. To do this, add "-s 720x352 -padtop 64 -padbottom 64" (without the quotes) to the "Custom FFMPEG Flags" text box in the profile editor on the Videora Tivo Converter app.
--Since the Videora Tivo Converter is just a front end, you could snag the command line arguments to ffmpeg and easily automate the process for unattended batch processing of videos if you are so inclined.
--If you have video files that are split into multiple smaller parts, you can use VirtualDub to assemble them into single files for easier viewing.
--If your video files have AC3 audio, you'll need to install an AC3 decompressor if you don't have one already. Google to find this.
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Also some news about the upcoming next release of Tivotogo: They're adding a feature that will take any web video syndicated via RSS, and automatically retrieve and convert it for your Tivo. This will expand the currently limited list of video blogs available as Tivocasts infinitely. Videora has software that sort of does this already, but I haven't messed with it.
Tivo + Videos on your Computer.
- Xatrei
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Tivo + Videos on your Computer.
"When I was a kid, my father told me, 'Never hit anyone in anger, unless you're absolutely sure you can get away with it.'" - Russel Ziskey