Warning: You need your media access key of your Tivo box. You can get that from the Tivo box or from Tivo.com account.
This works only with Linux. The steps below worked fine with Ubuntu. I’m not sure about other Linux distributions. Before you start the steps, make sure you have build essentials installed. Open a terminal and type
sudo apt-get install build-essentials
or search for build-essentials in Synaptic, if it’s not installed, install it. I’m not sure if it is needed to compile the tivodecode file, but it’s better to be on the safer side.
Go to this page and download tivodecode. The version I tried is 0.1.4. The downloaded file name would be tivodecode-0.1.4.tar.gz. Double click that file in Nautilus and extract it to wherever you want. Another way to extract is, open a terminal, go to the directory where you downloaded the file, and type
tar -xvf tivodecode-0.1.4.tar.gz
and press enter. It’ll extract the files to tivodecode-0.1.4 directory. Enter in the terminal
cd tivodecode-0.1.4
Once you are in tivodecode-0.1.4 folder, type make and press enter. This should compile the source file. I didn’t get any error while doing this. If you encounter any problem, try Ubuntu Forums for a solution.
if it’s compiled successfully, then go to objects.dir directory under tivodecode-0.1.4.
cd objects.dir
Download or copy the .tivo file here. I used the Tivo server in my Windows machine to download the .tivo file and then copied the file to my Ubuntu desktop. There are some utilities available for Linux to download the .tivo files. I tried one, but that didn’t work. I’ll blog about that as soon as I get it to work.
Once you copy the .tivo file, type the following command in the terminal:
./tivodecode -m xxxxxxxxxx -o outputfilename.mpg tivofilename.TiVo
where xxxxxxxxxx is your media access key, outputfilename.mpg is the output file name you want and tivofilename.tivo is your tivo file name.
It might take sometime to produce the output file, depending on the tivo file size. It took a minute or two to convert a 800MB file. Have fun.
downloading .tivo files via linux should be a snap. You should just go to https://your_tivos_ip_address
username will be: tivo
password will be your media access key
That will give you access to the files on your tivo. You should be able to save them to your linux box from here.
Pingback: Arun's Blog ยป How to convert Tivo files to MPEG mpeg
Thanks for the really handy blog post!