Briefly, my brother was on TV recently, and acquitted himself well. I got it on my TiVo, and would like to put it up on YouTube for the rest of the family to see.
However, there’s a big gap between the two machines, and I’m pretty tech-clueless.
Can this be done? If so, can it be done quickly and cheaply? (He’s my /o/n/l/y/ favorite brother, but there’s a limit to the resources I’m willing to put into this.)
Thanks for any advice.
If you have TiVo desktop you can get it to the computer, from there I think you’ll have to dig up a converter to get it to an mpeg format. Do you by any chance have a TV tuner card on your computer.
Honestly, the easiest way might be to get a video camera, and record it while it’s playing on the TiVo and use that to get it to the computer.
Surely you have an inline DVD burner hooked to your TiVo, right? Just pop the DVD into your ROM drive and away you go. I do all my conversions with freeware that has been around for years. Here’s a basic no-frills way to do it:
Open *.vob file containing the desired segment in DVD2AVI
Select desired segment using brackets
Choose XviD MPEG4 compression, default settings (CBR 900 kbps).
Open both files in VirtualDub
Select Full Processing Mode for the audio file and Direct Stream Copy for the video file.
Compress the audio using MPEG Layer-3 at 32 kbps stereo.
Save the *.avi
Upload to YouTube without resizing
There are some forums at the Tivo site where you can get help.
With Macs, there’s software you can get to play them on your computer, but it costs money. I’m not sure if it converts them to other formats, but I think it lets you burn DVDs or something. The PC version is free and may be able to do some of those things. They call all of that Tivo to Go.
To get ahold of the files, there’s a neat Web interface you can use. You hook up the Tivo to your home network or your computer using the USB ports. Once it’s hooked up you go to the system info and get the IP address of the Tivo, and the Media Access Key. You open any Web browser and type https:// and the the tivo’s IP address. You have to log in with the username “tivo” and and password being the access key. There will be a list of all the shows on your Tivo, and links for you to download them. It’s neat, you can see what’s new on the tivo from another room. It might even work from any computer on the Internet.
I think there are some third-party things that will convert the files, but I don’t know how well they work.
There’s also Tivo Desktop (for Macs at least) which lets you play videos and things like your Itunes remotely on the Tivo. Using the Web interface to get files and then playing them through the Desktop, you can use your computer’s drive as extra storage for the Tivo. The video part of it is hidden though. There’s a preference panel and you have to option-click it.
Tech-cluelessness may be an obstacle. But if you have or can get your TiVo connected to your computer network then 95% of the work is done.
Just download to TiVo show to your PC via TiVo Desktop app, search Google for a little thing called Directshow dump to convert them to mpg files, if you have to edit the segment at all use any simple video editing app (even MS Moviemaker), then just upload the mpg file to YouTube.
Nope.
I’ve used TDM quite a bit to move files into iTunes. Assuming you can post an MP4 to YouTube, this is a three step process on the Mac.
Please remember that this is a purely technical response, and is in no way intended to address any of the attendant copyright issues. It assumes that you have the legal right to post the footage of your brother. And TiVo enforces this by watermarking the file to make it uniquely identifiable. If you do not have the right to post this video, and if the copyright owner chooses to pursue this, they can identify you as the source of the video, both by linking your TiVo subscription to the watermark in the video, and by linking your YouTube registration to the upload.