Playing XVID Files on TiVo...

Yesterday I had some XVID files that I wanted to watch with my family on our family room TV. In the past, I have used an S-Video to Composite Video adapter, which I then plug into the 6-to-1 switch box that I put on the TV to allow us to select from the TiVo, VCR, one of three video game systems, or the digital camera input. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the adapter yesterday and searching my garage was not high on my list of Saturday projects. Then I realized that the TiVo-HD is a digital video player, and is already successfully connected to the TV, and is also connected to the home network via 100 MBit/second Ethernet. All I needed was a way to get it to play the video files.

Fortunately, this is a problem that has already been solved for me. A google search on "Transfer Video to Tivo" lead me here: http://www.zatznotfunny.com/gtt.htm

So I downloaded the latest free version of the TiVo Desktop software from here: http://www.tivo.com/buytivo/tivogear/software/index.html

Once I had that set up, I followed the instructions to get it talking to the TiVo in the family room, which just required getting the Media Access Key from the TiVo Messages & Settiles -> Account & System Info -> Media Access Key menu option.

Then I went in search of an MPEG-2 transcoder to convert the XVID files into the MPEG-2 files that the TiVo could play. While there are many pieces of software to do this, they often:

- Provide TOO much functionality, requiring the user to explicitly demultiplex the audio and video streams, transcode them separately, and then mux them back together, or
- Are trial-ware that expires after 30 days or watermarks the video output, or
- Require additional codec packs that may not be obvious or readily available.

After reading various articles about video conversion, I finally decided on "Super (C)" by eRightSoft: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html It is truly freeware, is easy to use but apparently quite flexible, and as far as I could tell it is widely used and likely legit and not a trojan horse or virus carrier.

Their download procedure is relatively insane, (described in various online forums with a variety of colorful language) in that you have to follow an easter-egg-hunt like chain of links to actually get the software. On that first page, go to a link at the bottom of that page and click on it ( "Start Download Super (C)" which takes you to http://www.erightsoft.com/Superdc.html ) . This in turn leads to another page with another download link toward the top of the page ( "Download and Use" which leads to http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html ), which opens yet another page where you will finally find the link to download the setup file at the bottom of that page: ( "Download Super (C) Setup File" which links to http://erightsoft.podzone.net/GetFile.php?SUPERsetup.exe ). Apparently they do this so that they can monitor the referrer and make sure that you get to the download from their website, so you may well need to go through this entire sequence. Failure to follow the breadcrumbs can apparently result in an endless loop of getting booted back to the front page. They have a better description of which links to follow in a download help link on their website. Yes, it is nuts.

Once you finally have Super (C) downloaded and installed, you just need to click the unselected radio button in the upper left hand corner of the window to put it into transcoding mode, select .mpg Output Container and MPEG-II Ouput Video Codec, and MPEG2 Output Audio Codec. Then you can drag and drop your XVID files onto the window and hit "Encode Active File," and soon enough you will have a file that can be dropped into your My TiVo Recordings folder and it is available for transfer to your TiVo.

One of the trade-offs in searching for the "single click" solution to any problem ( like this MPEG-2 Conversion) is that the generalized solution is never exactly the optimal solution. But in this case, since the entire purpose of the files is to live on the TiVo just long enough to be viewed once and then discarded, any suboptimal limitations are as yet imperceptible to me. It might be that with lots of tweeking, I could get the created MPG video files smaller, or slightly better quality, but I just don't care. They were quite good enough for casual viewing before being discarded again, since I still have the source XVID files on my PC.

Since setting this up, I have looked around a bit more and some people have have even written software that transcodes files directly and serve to the Tivo in lieu of the TiVo Desktop software, but I haven't looked into setting this up yet. Maybe some other weekend...