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January 8, 2007
toast 8 and tivo
Serendipity occurs at strange times.
After reaching a boiling point with my TiVos last night, I eventually broke through and was able to get my DVD-burning TiVo working reasonably well with both my home network and local video hardware. When I went to bed there were still some weird issues left that I needed to resolve, and figuring prominently among those lingering concerns was how I was going to reconfigure everything to download my TiVo shows over to my Mac, and then hack a codec conversion to actually watch them. I could fire up a PC and do it easily, but dammit- I'm a Mac guy. I've been able to successfully hack around both the TiVo's network and codec woes, but those hacks are painful at best.
So here comes serendipity- the TiVo folks had a pleasant surprise for me when I woke up today (it may have been dropped earlier, but I just found out today). TiVo To Go for Mac has, after long last, been released... well, sorta. Here's a peek:
Transferring TiVo shows on Mac
When I say it's been 'sorta' released, it's only because TiVo To Go/Mac does have a slight caveat- it's only available as part of Roxio's new Toast 8 Titanium, but damn if it doesn't work well, and fast. The only downer is that as opposed to the Windows counterpart, which is free (IIRC), you do have to pay to get either the full or upgrade version of Toast to get this sucka. But it was DEAD simple to set up and get going - with transfers going slightly faster than on my old PC, and conversion- even faster. The only downside I can see right now is that Tivo Transfer (the Toast 'module' that does all this) doesn't automatically convert my shows to PSP/iPod format the way TiVo To Go/PC does (including deleting the original 'big' file), which takes an additional conversion step or two to complete on the new Mac version. But generally-speaking, wow. Thanks, Roxio and TiVo! Now I can catch up on my Venture Brothers reruns on the train again. :D
Posted by Scott at January 8, 2007 7:01 PM