I forgot to mention that while I was home in NJ this weekend I ripped and encoded all of the Good Eats episode that had built up on the TiVo in my absence. The Good Eats Divx archive is now complete (or at least, current) and all episodes have been captured and verified. For quite awhile I had a nearly-complete archive, but I had two episodes which had broken encoding and needed replacement. This weekend those two episodes were replaced, and I also encoded two new episodes this season. Now everything is “up to date”.
Tivo Question
How does TiVo encode files? Also do you know anything about other DVR’s encoding schemes? I have a friend with a busted timewarner DVR left in house he just bought and hes curious to see what is on it.
Re: Tivo Question
Tivo uses their own proprietary “tystream” format, which is just a wrapper around MPEG-2 video and MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 audio streams. (I think the tystream wrapper provides some sync data, and I’m sure it houses other metadata as well). There are tools to convert tystream files to rip the MPEG data out of the tystream files without re-encoding…
As far as other DVRs go, I have no idea, I’ve never used one as nice as Tivo.
How large is your ‘collection’? I have all of the episodes (I think) in a mishmash archive of mixed quality files.
Each episode is approximately 150M, so the archive is about 15G. All the files have been watched end to end by myself (a few were screened by
BTW, every file in my archive was created from me (ripped from the Tivo and recompressed). They are all the same resolution and quality.
Hello! Wondering if you can help me… I just started brewing beer with my friend, and there was a ‘Good Eats’ episode that was on recently about the science behind beer and brewing. You said that you have all of the episodes on Divx, but do you have this episode? It’s episode EA1F10, and here is the link.
I would really like this episode, and was wondering if I could get a copy via the Internet. If not, that’s ok, don’t worry about it, but it never hurts to ask. I don’t have much to offer in return, but we can work something out if need be. I have a FTP server running where you could upload it if transfer is a problem. Thank you!! :-)
– spags
I can upload the one file, but i’m not really interested in pushing more than that to you… I just don’t want to be mr. Good Eats piracy boy… :)
Let me know where you want the file.
No problem, I just want this one episode anyway. Thank you! You can FTP it into my linux box. The host is spags.ath.cx and your userid is goodeats. Send me an e-mail to spags[at]spags.ath.cx and I’ll reply with the password. Thanks again!
i’m uploading foo.divx now… Interestingly enough, I went to upload it to you and noticed that the hard disk it was on was dead… :)
Fortunately, I had the episodes backed up on DVD-R, so I just pulled it back off..
Unfortunately, I have lost the two most recent episodes of GE as well as the Salt special, which were in the queue for processing into Divx.
sweet! I see you’re on comcast too.. Thanks man, I appreciate this! I’ll mail you a beer from our next batch, or buy you a beer next time I’m in Boston. :) Look at comcast’s speedy upstream go! W00t!
i’m an incredible large good eats fan and couldn’t help but need to contact you. I would do almost anything to have all of good eats rips and would like to make you a proposition if possible.
i would prefer to talk a bit more one-on-one, so if you could email me, that would be awesome.
hope to hear from you soon.