I’m in the process of updating/rebooting my home theater. The most complicated part of this is the Tivo/Live TV replacement.
I considered trying Hulu, but because I already have a HD-ready off-air antenna, I decided to see whether I could use that.
After some research, I picked up a HD HomeRun, which is a device that takes the OTA antenna signal and drops it onto the LAN. $88 on Amazon, one time fee.
To read those signals, I picked up Elgato’s EyeTV software, which essentially does the job of a Tivo (takes program guide information, allows user to schedule shows for recording, records the shows to disk). EyeTV is $79; it uses TVGuide.com’s Electronic Program Guide, which costs $20/year, first year is free.
So, for a startup cost of about $175, I now have TV shows recording automatically again.
And now, believe it or not, is where it actually starts getting complicated.
EyeTV produces shows packaged as .eyetv files. These files are little bundles that include; one or more video files containing the show itself, along with a few “metadata” files that contain things like the show’s title, air date, channel and assorted other stuff.
The .eyetv files are named things like:
Cheers – Where Everybody Knows Your Name.eyetv
But XBMC (or other home theater OS software — that’s another show) want to see TV shows named like this:
TV Shows/Cheers/Season 1/Cheers.S01E01 – Where Everybody Knows Your Name.mpg
So, the .eyetv file needs to be cracked open, and the metadata (which is in XML) needs to be parsed out to construct this new name.
Some poking around with Python produced a script to perform that task, and some additional Googling revealed a way to automatically fire off the Python script anytime a new .eyetv file shows up.
That gets us about 90% of the way there; honestly, that’s as far as Tivo had gotten. That is, the shows are now in the correct folder, and the HTPC can read them, but they still have commercials in them.
Various kind souls on the ‘net have figured out how to strip commercials from shows, and, if there is going to be a further upgrade to the new Tivo system, this will be it. Here’s an article about commercial skipping in EyeTV files (search for the post with the word “mp4chaps” in it).
Someday, we’ll start running into disk space problems, as there’s no auto-culling of shows. But, since the shows are broken out by show and season, it should be fairly straightforward to fix that later.
A final note: among other things I’ve figured out in this process, I discovered that we receive a total of 40 off-air channels at our house. Forty. There are at least 2 channels that show nothing but movies! In a word, w00t.