LincolnBlogs

Ok. A lot of people have asked me about when I was going to write something to take advantage of my Tivo from my Linux box. Some have even called it a “BashPodder for Tivo”. While I haven’t quite gone that far yet, I have written a script to make getting things off of my Tivo a *lot* easier for me. It’s a php script which you can download at http://lincgeek.org/linc/docs/tivo/getmytivo.tgz.

Now, for those of you who are interested, the tgz file contains only a single php file called tivo.php. In order to get this whole thing to work, you need to have php5 (cli) installed and working, mencoder, an mpeg4 codec, the tivodecode program installed, curl, and, of course, a working tivo with the web services running (mine’s a series 2).

Running the program is really easy. The first thing you need to do is edit the tivo.php file. You need to add your specific information to the 2nd and 3rd lines in the script that call for your Tivo’s IP address and MAK (Media Access Key) number. After that, go to the directory with the tivo.php script, and from the command line run it by doing “php tivo.php”. If all goes well, the script will check your Tivo to determine which files on there are downloadable and write all that information into a shell script called “getshows.sh”. You guessed it. You can run that getshows.sh script and it will get all the downloadable shows from your Tivo, convert them to playable mpeg and them reencode them to mpeg4, shrinking the size enormously in the process.

The getshows.sh script is easy enough to look through and edit before you run it, perhaps to delete shows from the script that you really do not want to download and convert, etc.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with ideas, tips and suggestions for this and we’ll see if we can all make this into something even more useful 😉