Here’s a list of Mac software which is capable of improving your “TiVo experience”. Some of the applications on this list may no longer work but, I thought I should include them just in case they ever get updated. If you’re a Windows user you might want to check out my Windows roundup which I published back in December of ‘07. A star () next to the application name means that I’ve actually used the application before.

Please let me know if I’ve left anything off the list….

tivobutler : TiVo Butler can be configured to watch multiple TiVos on the network and organize the shows into a readable and searchable list on your computer. Downloads can be scheduled and rules/smart groups can be configured to download programs as they appear.

TiVo Desktop : TiVo Desktop is the official Mac application from TiVo.com. The app allows you to browse and listen to your music on your TiVo. Along with this feature, TiVo Desktop also allows you to view photos and publish videos using TiVo Go Back.

Roxio Popcorn : Popcorn® 3 lets you enjoy your video anywhere you want, on the playback device of your choice. Easily make high quality copies of your DVDs and movies. Take television recordings from your Mac to the portable device of your choice for on-the-go viewing or fit 4 hours of video on a single layer-DVD. Now with batch video conversion, support for a broad range of consumer devices, and exclusive support for TiVoToGo transfers, your video will go everywhere you do. Review here.

Roxio Toast: Roxio Toast® 8 sets the standard for burning CDs, DVDs, and now Blu-ray discs on the Mac. Create superior sounding audio CDs with crossfades. Enjoy your TV shows anywhere with exclusive EyeTV burning and TiVoToGo transfers to DVD or iPod®. Copy your audio CDs, movies and DVDs. It’s your digital life, Toast It!

SeasonPassGetter (SPG) : SPG takes TiVo content and transfers it to iTunes. Its main purpose was to transfer regularly scheduled recordings (Season Pass on TiVo) for viewing on AppleTV. There was a lot of interest in content for the iPod, so when a show is transferred to iTunes, SPG will initiate an iPod sync. Wake up in the morning and your shows are ready to go. Review here.

TiVo File Decoder: Portable C program to convert a .TiVo file from TiVoToGo to a normal MPEG file given the MAK for the TiVo which generated the file. Used by several applications including TiVo DecodeManager and several other 3rd party addons.

VisualHub : VisualHub is a great application for converting video files into a number of different formats. One of the nice things about VisualHub is that it provides a TiVo “profile” which allows you to convert video files into a format that your TiVo will be able to playback using the TiVoGoBack feature. More information about this feature can be found here.

TiVo NowPlaying : OS X dashboard widget which allows you to transfer and transcode shows from your TiVo. Review here.

TiVoTool: TivoTool allows you to download, stream, or burn videos from your Series 1 or 2 Tivo or DTivo. You can also send videos to iTunes for viewing on a video enabled iPod. The command line version consists of a subset of these functions and works on Linux.

pyTiVo: pyTivo lets you stream most videos from your PC to your unhacked TiVo. pyTivo acts as a TiVo GoBack server. It loads many standard video compression codecs and outputs mpeg2 video to the TiVo. It allows you to watch videos that are stored on your computer in, say, DivX format without having to wait for the video to be transcoded first.

Just last night, a developer on TiVo Community announced a TiVo HME SDK for the Python programming language.  This announement comes just five days after the recently released TiVo HME SDK for the .NET framework.  Maybe just maybe will start to see new TiVo HME applications!

Spotted on TiVoLovers.

A user on TiVoCommunity.com recently announced that they’ve published a software developers kit (SDK) for the .NET framework. If you’d like, you can download this SDK directly from Google Code.

It really is great to see that people are still working with the HME SDK. I’ve said on number of occasions that TiVo should update the official SDK in hopes that it might generate even more software development from third party developers. After all, what’s better than “free” software development?

Help! My wife is addicted to downloading music videos via the Music Choice on TiVo service. Hopefully, this won’t prevent me from being able to watch College Basketball in high definition. Damn TiVo :)!

Quote from my wife:

This is awesome…I will never watch TV now. I will only do this….

This doesn’t look good for me…

TiVo has partnered with Music Choice to offer several hundred free music videos via the TiVoCast service. You can download the videos today if you own a broadband connected Series 2, Series 3 or TiVo HD (press release).

ALVISO, Calif., Dec 05, 2007 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ — TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Music Choice, the award-winning multi-platform music network, today announced the immediate availability of Music Choice on broadband-connected TiVo(R) DVRs. Music Choice will deliver its wide-ranging catalog of several thousand music videos and original programming to the television through the TiVoCast service. At launch nearly a thousand video titles are available and this number is expected to grow significantly in the coming weeks.

“Be it music, movies or memories, our broadband strategy continues to focus on delivering consumers what they want, when they want it,” said Tara Maitra, Vice President and GM of Content Services for TiVo Inc. “By bringing TiVo users Music Choice, we’re giving our subscribers access to the most extensive music offering available, delivering thousands of music videos straight to the TV. We think this service will be extremely popular among the TiVo audience.”

“We are thrilled to make our highly-popular music-related content available to TiVo users,” said Christina Tancredi, Executive Vice President of Music Choice. “This exciting relationship with TiVo allows us to extend the reach of our content to even more consumers across the country, and we’re confident once TiVo users try it, they’ll be hooked.”

By combining the TiVo interface with Music Choice content, TiVo has quickly emerged as the entertainment platform for music lovers. TiVo subscribers will be able to browse through a variety of music genres using TiVo’s easy-to-use and intuitive search interface, breezing through Music Choice content, featuring Rock, Pop, Hip Hop, R&B, Country, Latino, and Kids’ videos, Music Choice Originals featuring today’s hottest established and emerging artists, as well as daily entertainment news clips.

When considering the robust Music Choice offering and the recently announced availability of Rhapsody, with the current Internet radio offering from Live365, TiVo users truly have a 360-degree musical playground. Users can conceivably watch a documentary about an artist, add the artist to a playlist for their mobile device and then watch that artist over and over via music video.

Legendary VJ and music personality Martha Quinn has been at the forefront of music entertainment since her days as one of the most recognizable VJs in the world, and is one of many music lovers excited about the new feature on TiVo.

“From the time I started as a VJ, one thing has been obvious — music fans love to see their favorite artists via videos,” said Quinn, one of the first MTV VJs and now host of a popular Sirius satellite radio music show. “In a way, I see this as a new video revolution whereby fans pick the videos they want to watch and when, both saving and creating the video stars of today. TiVo and Music Choice have delivered exactly what fans have been asking for.”

All of the content on TiVoCast, including Music Choice, is offered at no additional charge as part of the existing TiVo service subscription fee. TiVo subscribers can access TiVoCast content through TiVo Central.

Over the past year, TiVo has done a wonderful job establishing partnerships with several third party content provides including Amazon Unbox, Rhapsody, One True Media, Photobucket/Picasa Web Albums and multiple TiVoCast channels. Each of these partnerships has helped to differentiate TiVo from a standard cable company DVR. Keep up the good work TiVo!

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As a side note, I would like to thank Craig for putting me down as his TiVo rewards referrer. If you’d like to put me down as your referrer, all you need to do is enter my email address (raianoat AT gmail DOT com) when you activate your TiVo. Thanks Craig. It really is appreciated!

Earlier today, TiVo announced that they’ve partnered up with both photobucket and Google’s Picasa Web Albums (screenshots after the press release).

ALVISO, Calif., Dec 03, 2007 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ — TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that all broadband-connected TiVo DVRs can take advantage of viewing and sharing their digital photos directly on the television set. By working with two of the most popular online photo services, Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums(TM) from Google, TiVo subscribers can easily access their own digital photos as well as those shared by friends and family using the Emmy award-winning TiVo user interface. Photos will be displayed at the highest possible resolution on each TiVo box, meaning TiVo Series3(TM) and TiVo HD subscribers can see their memories in full high definition.

“At TiVo we’re focused on the entire entertainment experience, from movies to music, and in this case — memories,” said Jim Denney, Vice President of Product Marketing at TiVo. “By working with these well-respected and popular photo-sharing partners TiVo enables families to share their pictures in new, fun ways. TiVo continues to show our commitment to differentiated product offerings by allowing subscribers to share their memories on the best picture frame in the house — their television.”

“Personal media sharing is clearly moving beyond the desktop,” said Alex Welch, President of Photobucket. “Photobucket helps its users creatively express themselves and share their lives with friends and family. Be it through cell phones, computers or TVs, we aim to offer our users the best service for searching, uploading and sharing this content. TiVo gives our audience an excellent way to bring Photobucket into their living rooms.”

Among other features, TiVo subscribers will be able to customize their photo viewing capabilities by searching community photos of interest by keyword, all using the intuitive TiVo search interface. For example, sports fanatics can create a custom slide show of their favorite team or player and dog lovers can sit back and enjoy a slide show composed of literally hundreds of puppy photos from around the world, all with the power of the peanut-shaped remote.

“Families and friends who use Picasa Web Albums to stay connected with each other’s lives are often looking for more ways to share those important photos,” said Mike Horowitz, product manager for Picasa Web Albums at Google. “Broadband-connected TiVo DVRs provide a fun way for people to view their own favorites or bring their photos out for everyone in the living room to see.”

TiVo subscribers can access the photo sharing application through the Music, Photos, Products & More screen on their TiVo DVR, and is offered at no additional charge as part of the existing TiVo service subscription fee. TiVo boxes are available at leading consumer electronic retailers including Best Buy and Circuit City. See http://www.TiVo.com for details.

Maybe I’m just being selfish but, I really would have loved to have seen TiVo partner with flickr instead of photobucket or Picasa Web. In any case, it’s great to see that TiVo continues to develop and release new TiVo HME applications. I’m really anxious to see how the HD photos will look on my Panasonic HDTV!

Earlier today, John Kohl released Galleon 2.5.2. According the release notes, 2.5.2 contains two major bug fixes:

Version 2.5.2:
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* Fixed bug with GoBack truncating files after 2GB had been transferred.
* Fixed another CPU-spinning bug in the screen saver

It’s great to see that John continues to work on Galleon. In my opinion, Galleon is the best TiVo HME application out there. Go ahead and download your copy of Galleon if you haven’t already….

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As a side note, I would like to thank Andrew for putting me down as his TiVo rewards referrer. If you’d like to put me down as your referrer, all you need to do is enter my email address (raianoat AT gmail DOT com) when you activate your TiVo. Thanks Andrew. It really is appreciated!

CNET has published a review of the Rhapsody on TiVo HME application which TiVo recently launched. Overall the review is rather positive and it definitely has me interested in trying Rhapsody on TiVo once my S2 & S3 receive the update.

Despite all these gripes, Rhapsody on TiVo shows a lot lot of promise. When it was working smoothly, it was great to extend the Rhapsody experience to my living room and the service certainly has the TiVo “touch.” While Apple TV is great for bringing your purchased iTunes music collection to your home theater, Rhapsody on TiVo effectively brings millions of songs to your home theater. I’m definitely not ready to give it my full recommendation–it’s much too glitchy in its current state–but if TiVo and Rhapsody can smooth the kinks out, they might have a killer service on their hands.