Registered: Feb 2003
Location: SF Bay Area, CA
Posts: 177

What are your favorite custom hacks? (Mine: "robo" batch save to VCR)

I'm so pleased with my new-and-improved DTiVo that just I had to gush publicly about it... & I figured there might be others out there who might want to do the same. Maybe we can limit this thread to hacks you customized or combined in some new or creative way?

I've spent under $10 on my hacks... using a humble bash-prompt-over-serial, I've assembled & tweaked a select batch of "tools" <cough> that have taken my DTiVo's usefulness to a whole new level!

Customized Hack #1: Batch Save to VCR -- My "ultimate solution" involved installing SendKey (a.k.a. "sendkeyandwait"), and modifying the included "mplay" script to streamline it & do a "Save to VCR" instead of play.

The result? "Robo-control" while I sleep! I select the first item to archive, issue a one-line command on my bash prompt, press "record" on my VCR and go to bed. My TiVo then issues phony remote control commands to go into "Save to VCR." It plays the selected program, bumps up to the next item to archive, selects "Save to VCR" on that item, etc.! Then when it's all done, it puts the TiVo into standby, so the rest of the tape is blank!

BTW, I use this instead of merge.tcl because I want the full item description to display before each recording.

__________________
Philips DSR6000 DirecTiVo, 68 hours with assorted custom hacks
(Like "Robo" Batch Save and "Friends Friendly" TivoTitle)
Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem.

Last edited by atreyu on 04-21-2003 at 08:51 PM

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Registered: Feb 2003
Location: SF Bay Area, CA
Posts: 177

Custom Hack #2: "Friends-friendly" TivoTitle: I started with tivotitle.tcl v0.94. This is a terrific script "off the shelf," but I wound up doctoring it it some to suit my taste. The original script lets you easily perform global title updates, like making the "Humm Vac" episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond" show up as "Raymond: Humm Vac" in NP.

But I was frustrated by "Friends," because every single episode title starts with "The One with the" or "The One where," which takes up pretty much the whole NP title field, so every Friends episode still looks the same after a re-title (ex. "Friends: The One with T...").

So I googled up a little info on how to do regular expressions in TCL, and added the following lines to the "APPEND_EPISODE" block of the statement "switch -exact $af":

regsub -nocase "^the one with " $append_string "" append_string
regsub -nocase "^the one where " $append_string "" append_string
regsub -nocase "^the " $append_string "" append_string

So now the episode titled "The One Where Everybody Finds out" is listed in NP as "Friends: Everybody Finds Out"!

The third line cuts "The" off the beginning of any episode title... that's a catch-all for Seinfeld and others shows that tend to do that.

I run this script every half hour + 1 minute (e.g. 7:01pm, 7:31pm, etc.), using Vixie Cron 3.0pl1-2. That way, my new episodes are re-titled right after they begin recording.

__________________
Philips DSR6000 DirecTiVo, 68 hours with assorted custom hacks
(Like "Robo" Batch Save and "Friends Friendly" TivoTitle)
Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem.

Last edited by atreyu on 04-21-2003 at 09:13 PM

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