Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 83 Playing Extracted Video

Now that you do have the video on your computer, what do you do with it?

So, you've extracted a handful of TV shows from TiVo, filling your PC's hard drive with these massive ty files. Now, how do you watch them?

As of this writing, there is only one program that can play the ty files directly: Chris Wingert's TiVo MPlayer (http://tivo-mplayer. sourceforge .net/). Based on the original MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/) movie player for Linux, Wingert's version adds extra code for reading, decoding, and playing back streams in real time. The TiVo MPlayer site provides Windows binaries using Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com), and instructions for compiling the player under Mac OS X and other varieties of Unix .

Working with the Windows version, extract the contents of the ZIP file in WinZip or some file- decompression utility. You're also going to need to work the MS-DOS prompt at this point, because there is no fancy GUI. You won't need Cygwin preinstalled , because Wingert carefully included all the files you need in the ZIP file. However, if you already have Cygwin installed, make sure that the version of cygwin1.dll in your installation is current.

To play back an episode of TechTV's Fresh Gear from fresh_gear.ty , invoke TiVo MPlayer from the command line, like so:

C:\Program Files\mplayer> mplayer fresh_gear.ty

The show should pop up in a new window and start playing immediately. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to fast forward and rewind. For full-screen mode, use the - fs command-line argument :

C:\Program Files\mplayer> mplayer -fs fresh_gear.ty

Once compiled, TiVo MPlayer behaves in the same way under Mac OS X and other Unix platforms.