MPlayer/TiVo_USE_Flag

Preface

In order to use the MPlayer TiVo USE flag you must have vstream-client already installed somewhere MPlayer knows where to look. Also needless to say your already hacked TiVo with the vserver daemon running.

vstream-client

You will need to compile/emerge vstream-client. First you will need to grab the vstream-client sources. You can either use the download from the Internet Archive, or the actual website if it's up. The download is corrupted, but it will unpack fine, you will just need to repack the tarball, adjust the SRC_URI in the ebuild provided below, and place into your distfiles directory.

vstream-client ebuild

I named my ebuild, media-video/vstream-client-1.2.ebuild and stashed it in my local repository. I admit it is poorly written, but I did not feel up to rewriting the Makefile or configure which vstream-client comes with.

# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $

inherit eutils
DESCRIPTION="vstream-client for TiVo"

# Homepage, not used by Portage directly but handy for developer reference
HOMEPAGE="http://web.archive.org/web/20060206103527/armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/vstream-client/"

# Point to any required sources; these will be automatically downloaded by
# Portage.
SRC_URI="http://web.archive.org/web/20060210010358/http://armory.nicewarrior.org/mirror.php?mirror=mirror-unt&path=vstream-client/vstream-client-${PV}.tar.gz"

# License of the package.  This must match the name of file(s) in
# /usr/portage/licenses/.  For complex license combination see the developer
# docs on gentoo.org for details.
LICENSE=""
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~x86"
IUSE=""
DEPEND=""
RDEPEND="${DEPEND}"

src_compile() {
        myconf=" \
                --prefix=${D}/usr \
                ${myconf}"
        einfo "Running ./configure"
        echo "CFLAGS=\"${CFLAGS}\" ./configure ${myconf}"
        CFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" ./configure ${myconf} || die
        emake || die "emake failed"
}

src_install() {
        einfo "installing"
        dobin vstream-client
        dolib.a libvstream-client.a
        insinto /usr/include
        doins vstream-client.h
        einfo "done"
}

You should create a digest, and to be sure you have the tarball.

ebuild vstream-client-1.2.ebuild digest

emerge vstream-client

emerge vstream-client

emerge MPlayer

Unless you've already installed vstream-client as directed above the tivo useflag will do nothing for you.

USE="tivo" emerge mplayer -tav

Using MPlayer with your TiVo

MPlayer command line

mplayer tivo://host/[list|llist|fsid] [options]

Example output.

In order to stream a program you will need to learn it's fsid. Below is output from the two URLs which provide the fsid, outside of say TiVoWebPlus. Don't worry about the "Failed to open" errors, for some reason it says that, but it doesn't matter as you can see below it's already provided the information.

mplayer tivo://tivohost/llist
Connecting to server xxxx[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]: 8074...
215370 -- 04/06/15 02:57 -- 03 -- Live
       Live -- 
215374 -- 04/10/15 02:57 -- 04 -- Live
       Live -- 
213173 -- 06/27/07 21:59 -- 06 -- SPKE
       Star Trek: Voyager -- Macrocosm
Failed to open tivo://tivohost/llist.
Exiting... (End of file)

mplayer tivo://tivohost/list
Connecting to server xxxx[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]: 8074...
215370 -- 04/06/15 02:57 -- 03 -- Live
215374 -- 04/10/15 02:57 -- 04 -- Live
213173 -- 06/27/07 21:59 -- 06 -- SPKE
Failed to open tivo://tivohost/list.

Watch a recorded/live program

mplayer tivo://tivohost/213173

Using tivo:// URLs in Mozilla Firefox

Go to your about:config page, by typing about:config in the location bar and create two new keys and values.

network.protocol-handler.app.tivo             /usr/bin/gmplayer
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.tivo   false

Possible errors

Your MPlayer is not properly configured/compiled with vstream support if you receive the following error:

No stream found to handle url tivo://tivohost/1105721

Also if you've already compiled your MPlayer with the TiVo USE Flag, and did not have vstream-client installed, you will have to re-emerge MPlayer.

See also

• TiVo-mplayer
• Internet Archive version of vstream-client website.
• MPlayer online Man page