accomplishedThat's a photo of the TV in front of me. The PIP shows the original video playing back on the TiVo. The main screen shows the DVD-R of the same stream playing on my Sony DVP-S530D DVD player. Swapping the sources back and forth, I don't see any quality difference between the two. (Although the DVD is shifted to the right a few pixels, dunno if this is technology's dig at the Democrat pictured.)
(I used the SOU response because it was the smallest piece of programming I had on the TiVo at the time. Smaller stream means less time in the test cycle.)
It'll take me a day or two to write and polish the writeup I promised. In the meantime, the software I used to do this includes:
| TiVoWeb-TCL MFSStream module | Selecting and serving program streams from the TiVo |
| Netscape 7.0 | Downloading streams to the Mac |
| tyc | Stripping the TiVo wrapper from the MPEG-2 |
| bbDemux | Demultiplexing the audio and video streams |
| MediaPipe | Upsampling the audio from 32 to 48 kHz |
| Sizzle | Multiplexing and creating the disc image |
| Disk Copy (Apple) | Burning the image file to DVD-R |
Sizzle and MediaPipe (probably bbDemux as well) are GUI wrappers around command-line tools available for Linux. Some of these tools also compile for Windows, others have Windows equivalents.
The DVD produced by this method has no menus and no chapters. It's one big long program. The version of dvdauthor Sizzle uses apparently doesn't support chapters, but the current one does. I'm planning to refine my process, getting rid of GUI tools as I go, and get this down to something I can run out of a shell or perl script.
I haven't studied how difficult it will be to remove commercials, but until that time I can probably write support for placing chapter stops at user-spec'ed time points from a file. You'd have to scan through the un-wrapped MPEG-2 in a viewer and note the end of each commercial break. Not pretty, but functional...
