TiVoDeskTop for Mac Frustration

[charmstr]

Hey all. I need to know if there is a way to transfer mpeg-4 files in .avi format from my Macintosh to TiVo. I've set up Tivo Desktop, enabled the hidden video features and loaded a bunch of .avi files into the appropriate subfolder. When I checked my TiVo, there was a folder for my iMac but none of the files showed up. I moved an .mpg file into the folder and it DID show up. Using DeskTop Plus on the PC, I was able to access .avi files without difficulty and I want to continue to do so using the Mac. What do I need to do? Will Toast take care of this for me? I don't mind spending the money it it will, but would hate to spend it and discover that it won't do what I need. I don't see anything in the Roxio literature that comes out and says it will.

Thanks in advance...

Charlie

[cas929]

I hope I'm not breaking any rules by mentioning a program other than Toast (please erase it if so) but I have been successful getting .avi files to play on my TiVo by first converting them to a TiVo-playable format with a program called VisualHub. It's very simple to use, and less expensive than Toast. I had to enable a function called TiVoGoBack, but that's simple and works easily with the TiVo Desktop pref.

After the file is converted, I drag it to the appropriate folder on my Mac, it shows up on my TiVo, I transfer it to the TiVo memory, it plays, no problem (at least so far!)

[Dennis Wilkinson]

TiVo Desktop for Mac's unsupported video feature can't transcode video; it already has to be in a TiVo-compatible format. pyTiVo and TiVo.Net both transcode on-the-fly like Windows TiVo Desktop and can be run on the Mac, and should handle your .avis.

[charmstr]

Thanks both of you. That is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I actually had pyTiVo on my PC at one point so that's interesting. (It will be interesting setting something like that up on the Mac... I'm still pretty much a ham-fisted newb on this system.) I will check out Visual Hub too. I was thinking about buying it anyway after I downloaded it to unlock the unsupported video feature on Desktop.

Out of curiosity though, will Toast do what I'm looking for? One of the reasons I bought a Mac was so I would be able to spend more time doing things and less time tweaking configurations.

Thanks again!

[Dennis Wilkinson]

Out of curiosity though, will Toast do what I'm looking for? One of the reasons I bought a Mac was so I would be able to spend more time doing things and less time tweaking configurations.

Toast is really for the opposite direction -- from the TiVo to your Mac (and from there to DVD or to your iPod/iPhone). It doesn't have the ability to serve things up to the TiVo, and to be honest, I'm not sure it can export as regular MPEG-2 without creating DVD-Video.

[bedelman]

I've been using the now developer abandoned TiVo.NET (TiVo Dot Net) solution on several Macintosh machines. It handles on-the-fly transcoding of over a dozen different video formats (including MP4 and AVI) -- and it continues to work with Leopard too.

A@ron made a preference pane for it as well as an installer that puts all the TiVo.NET stuff into place (you still have to install Novell's Mono framework -- but there's an installer for that as well)

To be completely honest, it TiVo.NET isn't perfect -- but I've been using it for months. And I've been able to get around just about any issue that comes up without too much finagling.

[charmstr]

Thanks a lot guys. pyTiVo looks even more daunting than I remember it so I look for the .net installer and read through the process for it first.

At least now I know my goal is achievable. Hopefully I will have enough time to get it done this weekend and my PC can fulfill its true destiny by becoming a BSD-based network storage device. :)

I'll let you know how it all worked out.

Charlie

[cas929]

I don't know much about Toast, but I don't think VisualHub has functionality to get video from your TiVo to your Mac. It goes the other way around, or at least that's the only way I've used it. But it's also very nice to have if you have .avi files that you'd like to play on your video-enabled iPod. Or files that you'd like to burn to a DVD.

I was able to get the program to work without tweaking any settings. It's pretty much a drag-and-drop procedure.

[ForrestB]

If your Tivo has been Superpatched, then you can run TivoServer on your Mac to serve up shows to your Tivo http://tivoserver.sourceforge.net/

TivoServer transcodes many file types on the fly, but it's piggy when it comes to CPU useage so you probably don't want to leave it running all the time.

[Unix_Beard]

Out of curiosity though, will Toast do what I'm looking for? One of the reasons I bought a Mac was so I would be able to spend more time doing things and less time tweaking configurations.


charmstr, yes, Tivo really makes it a total pain in the ass for Mac users.

I pretty much gave up on the hassles and bought an AppleTV. It takes the place of Unbox, Tivo Music and interne video/ripped DVD source.

I use the Tivos for what Tivos are good at - recording and playback of cable. I had high hopes at one point for the Tivo network services but development is virtually nonexistent for the Mac. I can't speak to the Windows software but seeing the titles of some of the threads, it doesn't seem good either.

[charmstr]

Thanks again, everyone. I tried transcoding with Visual Hub and it worked pretty well. I dumped a batch of 24 half-hour shows into it at high quality and a little over an hour later they had all been successfully transcoded to mpg and were available for download to my Tivo. That's a slick little app. Still I wasn't too happy with the fact that for whatever reason, i was unable to see how much of the file had been downloaded to the Tivo and I was unable to jump forward in the show (I could jump back, but was still unable to jump back forward again). So I looked at Tivo.net but wasn't happy about the fact that it was no longer being supported. So I've gone through all the steps of installing pyTivo. It's up and running but I don't have any files showing in it. That's probably because I don't have the path to my video folder listed correctly in the pyTivo.conf file. I'll fiddle with it and move on.

I was actually fairly satisfied with the way the application ran under Windows. It wasn't perfect, but I knew how to make it do what I wanted it to. Setting this up is a little tough since I'm not that familiar with OS X and am pretty rusty in Unix/Linux. (You should have seen me in bash trying to get from my home directory to Applications. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so sad!)