Tivo to Go on the Mac

[Berone]

Joining the ranks of those trying to get my Mac mini to talk to Tivo. The Roxio Toast solution seemed to work at first, but there didn't seem to be any way to transfer back to Tivo. A couple of hours later and it keeps shutting down without warning or provocation. Hey- what about Galleon? It looks good. Except the server keeps shutting down (at least I assume that's what happens - I get repeated "cannot connect to server" messages. Turning on the hidden video transfer for Tivo desktop doesn't seem to work for Tivo files, only mpgs. I've been doing searches for pertinent information, but everything I find seems to be from 2006 or earlier. Anyone have any modern suggestions?

Thanks,
Anthony

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Turning on the hidden video transfer for Tivo desktop doesn't seem to work for Tivo files, only mpgs.

The only solution I'm aware of that works at the moment for getting .TiVo files back to your TiVo from a Mac is to use a combination of the hidden TiVo Desktop video options and tivodecode to convert the .TiVo files into regular MPEGs. That loses most of the metadata associated with the files, unfortunately. The video options in Mac TiVo Desktop are broken with respect to TiVo files stemming from at least a change in the TiVo metadata itself and, apparently, some other changes in terms of what's expected of the server by the TiVo when the TiVo accesses the Mac.

[Berone]

grumble, grumble... Okay, how about support for Galleon? Every link I click on for help files is missing. Yesterday Tivo to Go worked on Galleon, today it doesn't. I think I went from version 2.3 to 2.52. That's the only version that I could find the Mac scripts for, and I couldn't get everything going without them.

Anthony

[jtkohl]

Galleon works for me on my mac mini. (2.5.3 prerelease, because I'm too lazy to put together a release).

Also, looks like galleon.tv (controlled by the previous maintainer) is going away soon and content is moving to galleon.sourceforge.net. Probably will mean some errors/bad links for a while, sorry about that.

Anybody want to help out, I don't have enough time to do Galleon justice.

[mattack]

How the heck do you set up galleon? I tried to do it, but as mentioned above, the links all seem to be bad. The app itself says something like (it's at home) "Choose File/Properties to setup". If I do that, or anything else, it tries to 'connect to server', and the server isn't there, so it times out.

[boomcha]

Hi there, I got my Tivo in December and I have a mac and I got it working so that I can watch programs that I got off the web on the Tivo and also copy shows from the Tivo to the mac.

I use a program called Visualhub combined with the official Tivo To Go programs. All you have to do is turn on the hidden Tivo Desktop Video Sharing panel and share the folder you want to the Tivo. Just make sure that your program that you have your mac are in a Tivo compatible format. Visualhub has a special setting for this and I have been using it since I bought the Tivo.

http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/

and it comes with a Tivo Desktop enabler for video. Its works great.

Ask me any other questions.

Later...

[Berone]

Okay, looks like I got Galleon working. Mattack - if you're on a Mac, try the download from this location: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=126291&package_id=138205&release_id=555612. It's a dmg file with the Mac scripts. Installation is quite straight forward, if you can figure out how to delete your old installation. I think part of the problem I had was that the database from the previous install was being appended rather than replaced. It was causing some confusion for me. Now I can't even find the database, but it seems to be cleaned up - I deleted everything I could find related to Galleon, then emptied my trash can and then redid the install. None of the additional apps are of interest to me, so I'm just concerning myself with TTG and GoBack. I'm not sure what I did that solved it, but one other thing I tried was setting up my rules in TTG and then exiting the configuration dialog and walking away. It took quite a while for the recorded list to be populated, and impatience on my part may have been part of the earlier problem. One other thing I found was that, when looking at the NPL available from the Mac, selecting an item and then going back would result in an error message. Clearing to the left and then reopening the list resolved that, but it is a glitch. One that I can live with, however.

I looked at visualhub, but it requires most everything to be done from the computer and, as this is ultimately going to be a headless system, I'm looking to be able to do most things from the Tivo once it's all set up. Supposedly Galleon can be administered remotely, but I haven't dug into that yet.

[mattack]

Hi there, I got my Tivo in December and I have a mac and I got it working so that I can watch programs that I got off the web on the Tivo and also copy shows from the Tivo to the mac.

I use a program called Visualhub combined with the official Tivo To Go programs. All you have to do is turn on the hidden Tivo Desktop Video Sharing panel and share the folder you want to the Tivo. Just make sure that your program that you have your mac are in a Tivo compatible format. Visualhub has a special setting for this and I have been using it since I bought the Tivo.

http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/


VisualHub looks like just a video converter. Does the "hidden Tivo Desktop Video Sharing panel" let you DOWNLOAD video from the Tivo? I had thought that that enabled unsupported uploading.

I actually *was* able to supposedly download a few recordings with the
https://tivoipaddress/nowplaying/
backdoor.. But they all show up as around 10 minutes or less in VLC.. Though playing with one more later, it seems like it might actually have all of the video (I didn't try to let it play for a very long time).

[RNico]

Is there a guide out there on how to use Galleon on a MAC?? I tried, but it always say try connecting to server... And then it says it can't find any tivo... Should I enter my tivo IP address??? And how do you KNOW your Tivo IP by the way??

Thanx!

[Berone]

You do have to enter your Tivo ip address. Look at your router's DHCP table and you should find it there (usually located at 192.168.1.1 and then look for the DHCP settings). Did you download the previously referenced dmg file? And follow the directions? Assuming you did that, you would have seen the "Galleon now ready" message and can go into configure to set things up. If you didn't get that far, start again. If you did, tell us where you are and we'll try to walk you through it.

[bedelman]

Easier way to find out your TiVo's IP address is to go to the Phone & Network settings screen.

[Berone]

Yeah, unless that means going down the stairs and interrupting your wife who's watching tv. I know better than to come between my wife and the Gilmore Girls!

One more note, for anyone trying to control a headless Mac as your Tivo server:
Vine is a remote control server and viewer for Mac.
http://www.redstonesoftware.com/products/vine/server/vineosx/index.html
UltraVNC is a viewer for Windows.
http://uvnc.com/

It took me about 10 minutes to install and configure them and I could run the Mac server from my Windows laptop, including, but not limited to, the Galleon control program. Way cool!

[boomcha]

Tivo Decode Manager allows you access the Tivo and download the files.
http://tdm.sourceforge.net/

Or you can use Roxio Toast 8 and its also able to access the recordings on the Tivo officially so that you burn a cd or whatever you want to do with it.

[Berone]

According to their website, Tivo Decodemanager is only for series 2 Tivos. And it seems to only go in one direction, so it's not viable to backup and restore programming.

Toast is an excellent choice for watching a program crash repeatedly with no explanation.

[Alfiejr]

have spent the afternoon trying to get both Tivo Decode Manager and Galleon working with my new Tivo HD, on my Mini running 10.5.2. no luck.

i got both all installed and set up OK after trial and error. both now 'see' all the shows recorded on the Tivo and are correctly configured. everything is enabled on the TiVo side too.

but ... Decode Manger tries to download but can't. the time projected just keeps increasing to thousands of hours and nothing actually is copied. ok, so it says it may not work with Series 3, i understand that could be the problem ...

then Galleon, i check the Save box on the Recorded list in ToGo in Configure Galleon, but then nothing happens. no download. What am i missing?