This is the first beta version of utilities to handle the Topfield TF4000PVR
hard disks under Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

You have to run the program with Administrator privileges (to get access
to the physical disk drive data) and from the Command line (do NOT run
the program by clicking on its icon!).

This version should work with disks > 128 GB, provided your PC and operating
system handles them correctly. The Topfield filesystem format has changed
since support for disks > 128 GB was inroduced, by increasing the allocation
block size (was 1MB, now depends on disk size).

Older versions of Windows (95/98/ME) are not supported, as they do not have
any standard way to access the raw hard disk device. If someone knows some
trick, please let me know. Windows NT might work, but probably disks
larger than 128 GB will fail. Actaully, disks > 32GB fail with some machines
and Windows NT 4.0.

The program requires that you attacht the Topfield hard drive to one of the
IDE adapters. Please check the master/slave settings to avoid any conflicts.
As in the Topfield box, the disk is set as MASTER/SINGLE. The program checks
all IDE devices from lowest to highest and processes the first disk with
Topfield signature found (up to 8 disks in total).

The program can read from Topfield disks, it cannot write to them yet. The
recordings are extracted in one of several formats:

disk - this copies the WHOLE disk (that is 40 GIGABYTES with the original
      drive) into a PC file called "tfdisk.img". If this file is later found
      in the current directory, no actual Topfield disk is searched fro
      and this disk image file is used instead. This is mainly for testing
      and will be used for the development of writing to disks.

raw - "as is" in the Topfield file system; this is a proprietary header,
      bookmarks and then the partial transport stream with the PIDs of the
      recorded program. You can use it for archiving or for further processing.

VOB - audio and video, transport stream format in packs of size 2048, compatible
      with DVD VOB file format. The Navigation Packs are empty in this version.

MP3 - audio track only, MPEG-1 Layer 1 to 3, elementary stream data only. Good
      for playback in Winamp or other MP3 players. The suffix is always MP3,
      even if the format is typically Layer 2.

M2V - video track only, MPEG-2 video data in ES format.
      Good for conversion to other formats or for playback in programs like
      the Elecard MPEG-2 player. The conversion of this format by various
      video conversion/authoring programs seems to be quite safe.

M2P - audio and video tracks, MPEG-2 Program Stream format (well, without
      headers at the moment).  Good for audio/video playback in Elecard MPEG-2
      player and for conversion to other formats. Please note that the MPEG-1
      sound typically found in DVB broadcasting is most likely NOT handled
      by DVD players. A lot of DVD authoring software fails with these files,
      the reasons are still being investigated.

TS  - Partial Transport Stream, audio/video/PMT data from the transport stream.
      This is for further conversion or for analysis of the data.

The resulting filename will have one of the above extensions and the base name
will be the name of recording, with characters "/:*?" converted to spaces.
The files will be created in the current directory.

The format is specified as the first parameter to the "tfget.exe" program.
The format is not case sensitive.

For M2P, it is possible to re-packet the data with the maximum packet size
specified as the second argument to "tfget.exe".
If no argument or 0 is given, the packets will stay as in the input stream.
THE REPACKETING DOES NOT WORK AT THE MOMENT AND SHOULD NOT BE USED.
DO NOT SPECIFY ANY 2ND ARGUMENT OR SET IT TO ZERO.

The program has been compiled with Mingw and should not need any other
libraries (DLLs) than those supplied with the operating system.
To compile the program from the sources, you need the following
files from the MINGW project to be installed:
- MINGW core
- binutils
- GCC
- Win32API

I personally use MINSYS as well as MINGW.

All the above files can be downloaded from http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/

KNOWN PROBLEMS:

The M2P format crashes most video editing/authoring software and does not work
with all video players.

The VOB format is not 100% DVD compatible yet. Some recordings are known to
work with some players, but more work and tests need to be done.

LINKS:

I have used with success the free demo of the Elecard shareware MPEG-2 player,
which is available from www.moonlight.co.il. It does not have too many
features, but seems to be fast and stable. Do not try it on the TS format, it
does not work (most probably due to missing PAT in TF files). For simultaneous
video and audio, use the M2P format with no re-packeting (the Elecard player is
one of the few which handles the produced M2P format well).

For conversion to other formats, the DVD2AVI program seems to be quite good,
although it has more problems than the Elecard player. (Use Google or other
popular search engine to find DVD2AVI and related programs). You can convert
the recordings to DivX AVIs or to other formats such as SVCD.

The format conversion is inspired by the code in MPEGTOOLS, which form a part
of the Linux driver and application for the Siemens DVB-S card. No code has
been taken directly, I have tried to write things from scratch and make it
much simpler than in the Siemens DVB implementation. Most of the bugs and
problems described above occur in the MPEGTOOLS implementation as well. If you
need some special conversion, you can always export the file as TS and
then use MPEGTOOLS to convert it to something else.

AUTHOR:

Petr Novak (PeN)
topfield@centrum.cz


History:

2001-12-15	Initial version for Windows NT 4.0 (or higher) only
2001-12-16	Second alpha version supporting Linux and Windows NT 4.0
                (or higher)
2002-02-17	Third alpha version supporting Windows NT (or higher) with
                conversion to several formats.
2002-07-06	First beta version supporting Windows 2000/XP, fixed M2P
		conversion bug, all my recordings now play without any
		problems in the Elecard player. Most files play in
		PowerDVD, but with no sound. The user interface has been
		all moved to tfget.c only, so that it can be replaced with a
		GUI control program (there are some volunteers who have
		promised to write one). New feature to save a whole disk
		image to a PC file and to use this image file instead of the
		real disk. Should handle disks > 128 GB (not tested).
2002-07-23	First beta. Fixed some problems, support for disks > 128 GB
		disks tested and confirmed, VOB file format first attempt.
