pyTivo, Tivo S2 AND HDTV

I have a Tivo. I love my Tivo. I have a computer with Windows XP and pyTivo. I love my pyTivo. Up until a little over a month ago, the lovefest in my house was all about the Tivo and the pyTivo. I could serve virtually any video content to my Series 2 Tivo and the Tivo just ate it up. I'm telling you, it was... well... Awesome!

Then my 26" RCA CRT Television died. That's right, it died. I was recovering from nose and throat surgery and it just died. My wife looked at me and said, "You are going to be in that chair for at least 3 weeks. I am going to buy a television." God bless her, she got in her van and I got on the internet. Later, she returned home with an inexpensive Visio 32" Plasma HDTV.

So, I love my Tivo. I love my pyTivo. I love my Plasma HDTV. But I don't love my pyTivo and Tivo interaction so much. Why? My pyTivo is serving up HD content to my Tivo with Letterboxing. That is what pyTivo is supposed to do when it is streaming to a non-HD Tivo. It thinks that it is doing right by me, after all it has no idea that my non-HD Tivo is connected to an HDTV. An HDTV that, by the way, is stretching the video to make it full screen, so the HD content looks stretched horizontally. What's a guy to do?!?

Well, here is what I did. As I am using the krkeegan branch of pyTivo, version 2008.05.02, I started by opening the web-based configuration console. Then I selected 'Global Server Settings' and clicked 'Edit Section'. Then I scrolled down to 'ffmpeg_tmpl' and inserted the following into the empty text field:

%(video_codec)s %(video_fps)s %(video_br)s %(max_video_br)s %(buff_size)s -aspect 4:3 -comment pyTivo.py %(audio_br)s %(audio_fr)s %(audio_ch)s %(audio_codec)s %(ffmpeg_pram)s %(format)s

I saved the changes and clicked 'Soft Reset pyTivo'. Now, it should be noted that although this worked for me it may not work for you. Your mileage may vary. That being said, I would like to point out that the above is the default with 1 minor change. I replaced "%(aspect_ratio)s" with "-aspect 4:3". That's it. Poof! It is now automagically converting the content on my PC to 4:3 regardless of the source aspect ratio and life is good again! No letterboxing! No borders! Just HD goodness.

Now you might think that the picture quality suffers. Well, if it does then I am just not seeing it.