The buzz this morning is that TiVoToGo for the Mac has finally arrived - in the form of software bundled with Roxio Toast Titanium 8. Unfortunately, Toast 8 is $99 - unlike the official TiVo Desktop for Windows.
TiVoToGo demoed almost exactly year ago at CES as a standalone application that seemed to remove the DRM from the files it downloaded from the TiVo. It’s a shame that it took TiVo a year to release this software, even more shameful that they encumbered it with DRM, and unforgivable to charge $99 for it.
“This is going to be the only official Mac solution,” said Adam Fingerman, Roxio’s director of product development. “There have been some other Mac hacks and shareware things that have popped up, but those technically violate the (TiVo) terms of service.”
Ironically, the “Mac hack” that Mr, Fingerman is referring to, TiVo Decode Manager (TDM), is a spitting image of the version of TiVo Desktop demoed at CES last year. TDM was also in the news this morning: they launched version 2.1. TDM lacks support for direct burning of TiVo recordings to DVD, but it makes up for that by stripping the DRM from the TivoToGo files, thanks to work by those on the Ti Vo To Go page of the alt.org wiki. Without the TiVo DRM, you’re able to do whatever you please with your recordings - re-encode them in whichever format you prefer, burn them to a DVD with software of your choice, or transfer them to your iPod or other portable player.
One additional feature that’s possible with the “Mac hacks” and not with TiVo’s official software - streaming video from the TiVo without waiting for it to download first, using curl, tivodecode, and mplayer:
curl -k --digest -u tivo:{MAK} -c /dev/null "{tivo2go url}" |
tivodecode -m {MAK} -- - |
mplayer -vf pp=lb -cache 32768 -
I have an Applescript application written to do this for me quickly, but it’s not ready for prime time yet. It’d be great if this functionality made it’s way into a future release of TiVo Decode Manager. :)