pyTivo

Description

pyTivo lets you stream most videos from your PC to your unhacked tivo.

pyTivo is both an HMO and GoBack server. Similar to TiVo Desktop, pyTivo loads many standard video compression codecs and outputs mpeg2 (or in some cases, h.264) video to the TiVo. However, pyTivo is able to load many more file types than TiVo Desktop.

pyTivo is in no way affiliated with TiVo, Inc.

The pyTivo information here and more is available on the pyTivo Wiki hosted on Sourceforge.

Requirements

OS = Anything that will run python and ffmpeg, which I think is anything. Known to work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Python - http://www.python.org/download/

• You need python version >= 2.5 and < 3.0 i.e. get the latest version 2 Python.

pywin32 (only to install as a service) - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=78018&package_id=79063

• Windows users only and only if you intend to install as a service

Usage

You need to edit pyTivo.conf in 3 places

1. ffmpeg=
2. [<name of share>]
3. path=

ffmpeg (download) should be the full path to ffmpeg including filename. path is the absolute path to your media, which may be a network share. See the comments in the sample pyTivo.conf.dist file.

run pyTivo.py

To install as a service in Windows

run pyTivoService.py --startup auto install

To remove service

run pyTivoService.py remove

Additional Help

1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
2. pyTivo Forum
3. pyTiVo thread at TiVo Community Forum

Notes

pyTivo was created by Jason Michalski ("armooo"). Contributors include Kevin R. Keegan, William McBrine, and Terry Mound ("wgw").

Installing on Windows

Install Python 3

• 3.6.2 is the latest version as of 9/13/2017
• it may be installed alongside of Python 2 and the installed Python Launcher will help run the correct version.

The netifaces dependency requires Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0. Get it with "Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools": http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

Clone this repository (e.g. into c:\py3Tivo) Open an Administrator Command Prompt (if you installed Python 3 into Program Files) and install the required python 3 packages (this should work even with both Python 2.7 and Python 3.x installed).

c:
cd \py3Tivo
py -3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Setting up development on Ubuntu 16.04 linux

python3

From DigitalOcean's page on setting up Python 3:

Install these apt packages:

• python3-dev
• python3-venv
• build-essential
• libssl-dev
• libffi-dev

I had listed these, but I don't think they're needed (at least on Linux Mint 18.3)

• python3-pip (already installed?)
• pylint3 (install via pip instead)

Create a Python 3 virtual environment for py3tivo (see DigitalOcean's page)

cd <pytivo repository root> and create the virtual env directory in there
python3 -m venv venv
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install pylint

Install these python packages (with pip):

• zeroconf
• mutagen
• cheetah3
• pytz
• tzlocal

The required python packages are in requirements.txt and may be installed by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Development TODO

Python 3 conversion (Done)

• Start from latest code in wmcbrine's pytivo repository
• run 2to3 over all files
• replace local Cheetah copy by using pip install Cheetah3
• replace local mutagen copy by using pip install mutagen
• replace local zeroconf copy by using pip install zeroconf
• start fixing Python 3 conversion issues that 2to3 didn't catch as they manifest
  • many str/bytes issues
  • seems Cheetah3 raises NameMapper.NotFound: cannot find 'size' while searching for 'video.size' while the old one silently replaced the missing attribute with nothing

Most important functionality (for me)

• togo: be able to download videos in TS from TiVos
• pull: Pull video from pyTivo share to TiVo

I've never used the music & picture sharing functionality so I'm not even sure at this point how to test them.

Next:

• (Done - 1.6.7) Merge in desired changes from Dan203's fork
• Refactor togo plugin for clarity and thread safety
  • (Done) extract download thread functionity into separate module/class
  • NPL (should be looked at, may or may not need changes)
• Add something like kmttg's naming for saving togo files
  • (Done) Create new ShowInfo class to encapsulate a show's metadata
  • Some metadata is no longer being supplied from the TiVo, may have to get it from mind
• Pre-compile the Cheetah templates sample makefile
• see if it makes sense to replace lrucache.py with @functools.lru_cache decorator
• see if it makes sense to replace urllib.request with the Requests package.
• update the use of configparser because Legacy API Ex. says "...mapping protocol access is preferred for new projects."
• use subprocess.run instead of Popen where it makes sense.
• consistently return a ffmpeg options in lists not strings in transcode.py
• enhance web UI (not even sure what that means yet)