Mac TiVo Desktop 1.9.4 To Support Native .tivo Playback?
If you’re a Mac user like me, you’re probably frustrated with how TiVoToGo currently works on your Mac. Right now, if you want to playback a .tivo file you either have to purchase the officially supported solution (Roxio Toast/Popcorn) or use an unsupported utility such as TiVo Butler which strips the DRM from the .tivo file so that you can playback your recordings.
Well, according to a number of TiVoCommunity users, this limitation (along with several others) may no longer exist as soon as TiVo releases TiVo Desktop version 1.9.4. According to this thread, TiVo recently published a newer version of TiVo Desktop (v1.9.4) which appears to include a number of features including the ability to playback .tivo files on your Mac. The update has since been taken off of TiVo’s website however, the fact that an update briefly appeared seems to indicate that we should see a new version sometime in the near future.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:05 pm |
Is TiVo Readying A New Mac Desktop With Native Playback?…
While the Windows TiVo Desktop is up to version 2.6.2 and it has long had native support for TiVoToGo file playback, and more recently transcoding for TiVo Web Video, and more, the Mac TiVo Desktop has languished at version 1.9.3, lacking most of the n…
July 30th, 2008 at 8:08 pm |
Well, it’s available on Version Tracker and no, it does not appear to support native TiVo playback. At least not in QuickTime Player. I installed it and yes there is a TiVo File Support.component in the /Library/QuickTime/ directory along with the other components. It’s not exposed in the TiVo desktop in system prefs either. So it’s a mystery to me. Maybe it requires an upcoming change to QuickTime?
August 26th, 2008 at 2:18 pm |
During the Beijing Olympics I have been running Windows Tivo Desktop in VMWare Fusion to backup the huge amount of high def content from my Tivo HD. However, every couple of days I have to re-run the install of Windows Tivo Desktop in repair mode when I get the “internal error” message - sometimes restart of Windows works. Anyway, I want to ditch Windows Tivo Desktop because of its limited reliability and use Mac Tivo Desktop, but the program information for Mac Tivo Desktop is limited after converting the .tivo files to .mpg. All you can see from the Tivo HD is the truncated file names.
Currently, I have written a perl script that takes the Windows filenames of the .tivo files and parses them into something that can display a bit of the series name, then a hyphen, then the show name, and then the record date in the .mpg filename. Hopefully, this will work out reasonably well and I will be able to tell what I am selecting when pulling a recording from the Mac to a Tivo HD. Then I can just add the job to cron to run every day and automatically convert any .tivo files to .mpg files. Also, the script checks the file size of the input file and output file and deletes the input file if the output file is within 100,000 bytes of the input file - .tivo file always 17000 to 30000 bytes larger.
If you would like to post the perl script code that I wrote, you are welcome to it. Also, is it allowed to post a compiled copy of tivodecode? It took me quite a while to figure out how to compile the source in Leopard. It could be useful to others who don’t want to bother compiling the source.
- Ralph
October 9th, 2008 at 3:12 pm |
I also have the Windows Tivo desktop software running under Fusion but I can’t get it to work. It doesn’t list any of the programming on my Tivo box. Do you know what might be the problem?
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 am |
Same issue as Mike above, running Windows Tivo Desktop v2.6.2 under VMware fusion on my imac, can’t get it to see tivo(s) on local network. Tried changing to 2nd network card in config, didn’t do anything…..