Mac has broken VLC's tivo .ty and ty+ capability

[Redux]

Somewhere along the line VLC's ability to play tivo .ty and .ty+ files has been compromised. These videos now freeze at what seem to be the file segment borders (where the files typically have some noise). I believe this is due to some change in the Mac OS, as even previous versions of VLC, which had once worked fine, now do not.

I am seeing this on a variety of Intel Macs with OS 10.5.6, testing all the way back to several VLC 8.x's which were patched by 3rd parties to handle .ty's and which had worked fine for a long time. Something has changed either in the OS or something I've got installed that's triggering the behavior in all VLC versions (those that natively handle or have been patched to handle the .ty's).

I'm going to start analyzing, rolling back the OS on some test partitions, etc. but I'd be interested if anyone else is seeing this and/or has any thoughts. I have many hundreds of old .ty and .ty+ files and one of the great pleasures of VLC has been its ability to handle those files along with all the other file types, one program for all.

A work-around is to back up a few seconds at the freeze and jump past the segment border, but a typical movie has several borders so that's not fun.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Did you try latest VLC (0.9.9a) ?

[Redux]

Did you try latest VLC (0.9.9a) ?

Yes. In fact, that's when I first noticed it. But I then re-installed older versions of VLC (.ty/.ty+capable) and see the same behavior, even though these older versions did NOT have this problem in the past. Three different Mac computers, all Intel and all OS X 10.5.6.

[The DJ]

Did you try with older tivo files ? Perhaps they changed....

[Redux]

Did you try with older tivo files ?

The .ty and .ty+ files I'm talking about are older files which have worked in the past.

EDITED TO ADD: To clarify and hopefully not confuse: Yes, it is reported that .ty files produced by the newer series 3 Tivos don't work with VLC, never have. This has not generally been regarded as a problem by Tivo 3 users because Tivo 3's easily produce standard (kinda) mpeg files which VLC and just about all other players handle fine, and I don't even know anybody in my user community who's generating .ty files from tivo series 3's.

For the Tivo series 1 and 2 and "2.5", including DirecTV Tivos, it's a whole different story, ty is generally the easiest and most useful output. VLC's ty capability is enormously important to such Tivo users. There have been 2 types of ty file for these generations of Tivo. The first and oldest type has been playable on VLC for many years. The capability of playing the second type (roughly year 2003+) was added to VLC by third parties a few years ago, had to be patched very specifically for each 8.x (and I think early 9.x) version. At some point a year or so ago the ability to play the second newer type of ty was added into the VLC official cannon and all pre-Tivo 3 ty/ty+ files played great on VLC versions from that point on, routinely. Life was good.

The recent problem, which may well be something specific to my setup, is that ty or ty+ files of THE FIRST 2 TYPES (NON-TIVO 3), freeze at what seems to be those points in in the ty file where file portions have been butted together by the ty creation process. There is typically a little noise at these points, too brief to be visible; but apparently ALL versions of ty-capable VLC, patched or native, are choking at these points.

The issue of newer ty files from series 3 Tivos is NOT what I am referring to here.

[Redux]

More experience. Some tivo ty files abort VLC rather than freezing. A few ty's play OK all the way through (rare). Also some ty's do not fail at every "border" point; some survive until a second or later point. In some of these survival cases there is minor and brief picture break up at the earlier points, but the file does not freeze or abort at those points. I do not remember seeing such breakup before. When any ty files are repackaged into a more standard mpeg2 (via tytompeg) they play fine, using VLC or just about any other player.

Without VLC, ty's are of limited use. Many versions of MPlayer work with the ty's, but many do not, including the most recent "extended" Mac versions, and there has always been a frequent lip-sync problem with MPlayer with many files.

Reluctantly I have started to batch-convert my old ty's. A thousand down and three or four thousand to go! And I will pretty much abandon ty files moving forward. It is a real shame, but a very real fact of life, that Tivo is becoming irrelevant to the TV world it created. VLC was incredibly useful in playing tivo ty files, and I appreciate it.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Or you could fill some bugs and give us samples.

[Capvermell]

This is very odd as when I first had this Core i5 HP Windows 7 laptop in Feb last year (2012) I tried installing VLC Media Player and could not play .ty files from my S1 UK Tivo, even though I had been able to play them with a version of VLC Media Player I was running on my previous Intel Centrino Windows XP laptop (2005 HP laptop machine).

Like other people I also tried installing varrious old versions of VLC Media Player but to no avail and the pictures continued to break up and pixellate when I tried to play the .ty Tivo program recording file.

However now today (10th January 2013) I try again and I find that all old versions of VLC Media Player between version 0.8.6.d and version 1.0.3 available at http://www.downloadoldversion.com/vlc-m ... tml#vlc099 wil play TY files recorded on my Tivo any time between December 2002 and today (I have a few going back that far and they survived my later upgrade to a much larger hard drive) absolutely fine with no breakup or pixellation at all.

Nothing has changed in my Tivo .ty files and nor has anything in these old versions of VLC Media Player changed (since they are by definition static and frozen in time) so I can only assume that something on the Video Playback side of Windows 7 has changed to deal with the corruption issues that were going on when trying to play back .ty files on a Windows 7 machine.

The fact on I can now play these files on my PC again is very good news although emboldened by this success I am also going to try and install the latest version of VLC Media Player and see if the problem has also been resolved with .ty Tivo files in that version too.

EDIT:- OK I just tried this and as soon as I deinstall one of the older versions of VLC Media Player found at http://www.downloadoldversion.com/vlc-m ... tml#vlc099 and instead install the current version 2.0.5 found at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/I get the problems I had before with playback of Tivo .tv files from my S1 Tivo breaking up in to a jumble of pixellation and only occasionally clearing. Changing deinterlacing settings etc does not help. However as soom as I deinstall version 2.0.5 of VLC Media Player and install version 1.03 instead I can play my Tivo .ty files without any issue.

I see that there is actually a full version history all the way through the development of VLC Media Player at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/fil ... rce=navbar with all the old versions of VLC available to download and install. Previously when I tried to sort this out I couldn't find a version online older than about 1.1.12 and I think the change that cuased the stuttering on ty file playback happened just before this. I will probably try installing v 1.0.6 and v 1.1.1 and see if the problem that messed up playing .tv files in VLC was introduced at that point?

Either way it isn't a problem with WIndows or a change in the format of the .ty files but a fault in terms of decoding .ty files introduced in to VLC Media Player. I expect this happened in order to accommodate playing of some other newer and more modern file format that was more important to the project than old Tivo .ty files.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

File a bug as soon as you have found the first working and the first not working version.

[Capvermell]

File a bug as soon as you have found the first working and the first not working version.

Unfortunately the old versions of VLC Media Player available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/fil ... rce=navbar for the 1.1.x versions of the program (where the bug probably first crept in at around v 1.1.1 or 1.1.2) are not conventional Windows Exe install files but are comprised of archives made up of files with .sha256, .biz, .tar and various other extensions. Hence managing to install these files as a fully operating Windows version to test does not look as though it would be at all easy. The older versions of the program in the other archive that I installed and tested were all full .exe install files of the Windows 32 version of the program.

So unless you know how to get from these strange archives of the more recent versions of the program to the installed version I doubt I will be able to test this further.

I suppose I could at least still report the apparent introduction of a bug that prevents the playing of Tivo .ty format files somewhere between v1.1.4 and v1.1.14 and hope that the developers will be able to track it down from that.

EDIT:- I have now lodged a formal support ticket for this issue at https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/8022

The ticket reads as follows:-

As an owner of a UK Series 1 Tivo since 2002 I had also been able to extract the native .ty video files from it since mid 2005 using TY Tools following my installation of a Cachecard network card for the Tivo at that time.

Once I was able to extract each program recorded on the Tivo as a .ty file I soon found that I could play the raw .ty files on my laptop PC directly in then current versions of VLC Media Player such as 0.9.4 These files played in full and without pixellation on my Intel Centrino based HP laptop running Windows XP.

More recently following the demise of my old Centrino laptop I needed to install VLC Media Player on my new Corei5 laptop and did so using one of the latest V2 versions of the software available at http://www.videolan.org I then found that newer versions of VLC Media Player from as far back as possibly V1.1.11 or V1.1.12 would no longer play .ty file Tivo native video files properly and instead although VLC tried to play the program file and could play some audio the picture would constantly break up in to massive unwatchable pixellation.

I then came across older versions of VLC Media Player and found that these versions of VLC between 0.8.6.d and 1.0.3 would still play the exact same .TY Tivo files I could not get to play properly with the current version of VLC Media Player

I have further discussed this issue in the most recent posts in this thread at viewtopic.php?f=12&t=57986&p=364122#p364122 on the VideoLan forum. This problem has been extremely long running so I am surprised it has not yet been addressed by the VLC project. It would appear that the ability of VLC to play .ty files may possibly have been broken by changes made to the program to support newer kinds of video format?

If you can investigate and resolve this very annoying issue it would be very much appreciated as clearly it is undesirable to force users of Tivo .ty files to have to use such an old version of the VLC Media Player program.

[funman]

Unfortunately the old versions of VLC Media Player available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/fil ... rce=navbar for the 1.1.x versions of the program (where the bug probably first crept in at around v 1.1.1 or 1.1.2) are not conventional Windows Exe install files but are comprised of archives made up of files with .sha256, .biz, .tar and various other extensions.

Please look better.

Locate the win32 folder, then the .exe download for each version.

[Capvermell]

Locate the win32 folder, then the .exe download for each version.

Well after spending a lot of time installing, testing and uninstalling versions later than 1.0.3 listed at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/fil ... rce=navbar the position proved to be complicated. In particular I found that once I had installed a version of 1.1.10 or later that no matter how hard I tried to uninstall that version and also manually delete the directory remnants for the program (since the Uninstaller does not seem to work properly and always leaves the program directory still in placed populated with files) that when I installed the next version and went to Help and About I was always told the version installed was now 1.1.10 - "The Locker" even if I had actually just installed say version 0.9.9 or 1.0.3 I also found that all the versions of 1.0.3 or less that formerly worked playing .ty files now broke up when playing the files because they seemed to still have some corrupted remnant of version 1.1.10 left on the computer.

In the end I only managed to resolve this by doing a System Restore on my Win7 64 bit laptop to two weeks ago. At that point it was no problem to install Version 1.0.3 and then play the .ty files normally without any pixellation and when I went in to Help and About Version 1.0.3 was now reported properly instead of 1.1.10

It also turns out that the Win 32 exe install files are missing for certain versions at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/fil ... rce=navbar such as V1.0.4 even though the exe file is there in the WIn32 directory for the majority but not all of the other versions.

In short something in the Install versions between 1.0.5 and 1.1.10 seems to both introduce the Playback corruption with .ty files and corruptd the whole installation so horribly that VLC Media Player can no longer be uninstalled in a way that lets you roll back to earlier versions and get rid of the ty file playing corruption.

I leave it for others with a greater understanding of the development history of the program to work out why this might be the case.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/ is the right place for downloads, not sourceforge...

And it is possible that it does not uninstall, because of still running.