PHP Upload Progress Bar

Originally posted August 23, 2006

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Update: 4/8/07, added a 5.2.1 patch to the php5 tar ball
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Ever wanted to display the progress of an upload to your user? This is handy for large uploads, gives users of your web site an idea of how long is left on the upload.

Unfortunately, PHP doesn’t provide this ability natively. Your first line of code in your PHP program receiving the upload doesn’t run until after the upload is complete. Therefore, there is no way, natively, for you to know the progress of the upload during the upload. Fortunately, I have a real solution. I downloaded a PHP source code patch (original patch available here http://pdoru.from.ro/) that adds this ability to PHP, then modified it to log data to a MySQL table or a flat file. The original patch did flat file only, which doesn’t work well on load balanced systems that need to share a data repository.

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Backup Tivo shows to your linux desktop

This is for a Linux desktop, I used Fedora Core 7 at the time. Also, working with Series 2 Tivo DVR. Anything else, who knows, maybe the same, maybe similar, maybe not at all, I have no idea. Everything in this write up uses freeware.

First, get and install tivodecode and pyTivo (which requires ffmpeg)
http://tivodecode.sourceforge.net/
http://pytivo.armooo.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg/

…. tivodecode creates mpeg2 files out of .TiVo files. This makes it more suitable for other applications. Really a .TiVo file is a .mpg, but with some special header or something on it. tivodecode just makes a new file without the header, just a pure mpeg2 file that most other applications can read.

“pyTivo”, works like the Tivo Desktop, but it’s for Linux. You can backup your TiVo recorded shows to your linux desktop, then share them back with your TiVo. This lets you move shows off your Tivo, making disk space for more shows. If you’re like me, your Tivo only has a little 40 Gig hard drive, but my desktop is loaded.

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