Hack 86. Putting Videos Back into TiVo | Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 86 Putting Videos Back into TiVo

You have all these great videos you've been archiving from your TiVo, but you miss watching them on your TV; let's put them back into your TiVo .

No coverage of extracting video from your TiVo would be complete without talking about how to put them back in. While you can't really put ty files back into your TiVo box, you can extract and reinject those tmf files [Hack #81] we mentioned earlier. Those are magic files you can take off and put back onto your TiVo at any time.

Let's say you already have the mfs_ftp server running on your TiVo. Let's also say that you have some tmf files you extracted on your PC and since deleted from your TiVo. It sure would be nice to see them on the 36" screen again. No problem. Open an FTP connection to your TiVo, navigate to the tmf directory where you found the files in the first place, and upload them again. Wait about ten minutes per hour you want to upload. Visit your TiVo's Now Playing menu, and your shows should once again be there, ready for playing.

Does this mean that every time you want to do anything interesting with extracted video, yet still be able to put shows back, you need to extract both a ty and the corresponding tmf file? Not at all! The tmf file is actually composed of the ty file or files containing the television program itself and the XML show information. The combination of the two is what allows your TiVo to accept a new file into its Now Showing pile. So, the question remains: how do you separate them out? Simply treat them as a TAR archive, a common, ZIP-like form of archive used on Unix systems. Append a .tar extension to the end of the file, run it through WinZip, UnStuffit, or tar on the command line, and out pops out an xml file and ty files. You can take a quick peek using tar 's tvf option, which lists, but does not extract, the contents of the archive:

 $  tar tvf 1694436\ Good\ Eats\ -\ Tomatoes.tmf  -rw-r--r-- tivo/tivo   2077 2003-06-06 11:01:33 showing.xml -rw-r--r-- tivo/tivo 536870912 2003-06-06 11:01:33 part00.ty -rw-r--r-- tivo/tivo 201326592 2003-06-06 11:12:28 part01.ty

Don't be surprised if there are more than one ty file in the archive. The TiVo breaks up all recorded programs into a bunch of streams that it stores on its drive; MPlayer [Hack #84] and the rest just clump it together into one big file. mfs_ftp does its best to keep everything just the way TiVos like it, so putting it back onto TiVo goes smoothly.

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