Mac TiVo Desktop, iTiVo? Roxio Toast, pyTivo?

[erichoth]

Hi everyone,

My Tivo just arrived and I'll unpack it tonight when I get home. So excited!

I just have a few questions. I've read on tivo.com that Tivo Desktop for Mac will allow me to view my photos and music on Tivo, but it says I have to buy Roxio Toast 10 ($100) to download/convert from Tivo to put on my iPod. How come they offer that for PC (Tivo Desktop Plus) for $25? Should I just use iTiVo instead of Roxio? I don't want to shell out $100 for Roxio Toast.

Then what about uploading videos from Mac to Tivo? I read on old forum posts that holding command or option while launching Tivo Desktop will produce the video tab. Does that still work? I don't have a ton of video I want uploaded, but sometimes I'm working on a home video (vacation or birthday party or whatever) in iMovie or Final Cut and I'd like to quickly view it on the TV and make sure I've done it right.

What is pyTivo? Does it just do uploads? I hate putting extra stuff on I don't need just for one function of the software.

I've seen several posts from Mac users out there so hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction.

Eric

[bedelman]

I'm sure Yoav (iTiVo and pyTiVoX creator) will post on this thread and both are very good (if not great) applications.

I've been using Toast for years and I have a need for the other capabilities that Toast offers which is part of the reason I have Toast 9. You should know that you can also use Roxio's Popcorn 3 as well for the TiVo features -- and it costs less because it doesn't have all the other stuff that Toast offers. Also, Toast can be usually found for much less than the $99 retail price.

A quick search shows Popcorn 3 can be found for $38 and Toast 10 (not the "Platinum" edition) for $61.

While the command key feature continues to work with TiVo Desktop for Mac OSX, it only supports MPEG-2 and .tivo files. I use Yoav's pyTiVoX for all the other formats.

- Bob

[Yoav]

I heartily recommend pyTivoX for sending movies from your mac to the tivo. I suspect you'll be a lot happier using it over any solution from tivo.

As for fetching from the tivo, you have multiple options. I generally prefer 'free' over 'pay' software, so I'd recommend either iTiVo (http://code.google.com/p/itivo/) or kmttg (http://code.google.com/p/kmttg/). Since I maintain iTiVo I'm a little biassed in favor of it, but really both are just pretty front-ends for tools like tivodecode, curl, mencoder, ffmpeg, etc, and I think both are good. so I think it's mostly down to which interface you like better.

If your main aim is to download, edit, and then burn to a DVD though, then I'd recommend getting Toast, as neither of the free tools do manual edits (although both offer automatic commercial stripping).

My recommendation. Get pyTivoX and iTiVo, and try them out. You can always delete them if they don't meet your needs.

[richsadams]

Toast Titanium was the most buggy, non-intuitive program I've ever had the misfortune of using. Not sure about Popcorn, never tried it. I might give it a shot if there's a free trial, but my experience with Roxio products over the years has been mediocre to awful.

I'm still using the best video editing program available, VideoReDo TVSuite, to edit TiVo recordings. Unfortunately it's only available in Windows fortmat at the moment (they are busy with a Mac version) so I have VMWare Fusion on my Macbook to run it (but it'll probably run under one of the free virtual PC programs available).

Download PyTiVox and iTiVo and you'll have two excellent free programs that will do everything you need otherwise. :up:

[bedelman]

Toast Titanium was the most buggy, non-intuitive program I've ever had the misfortune of using.

As they say, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). I've had little to no issues with Toast. There were some A/V sync issues in the early versions, but the updates took care of that. Toast does want to have enough disk space to do its job and the way you have to use the Setup Assistant to enable the TiVo features is a bit goofy (but the latter is only an occasional thing -- and once you know that, it's not that much of an inconvenience)

Also starting with version 9, Toast supports the El Gato Turbo.264 which has made a huge difference in the amount of time it takes to convert video. I wonder if Yoav could add Turbo.264 support to iTiVo?

- Bob

[Yoav]

Also starting with version 9, Toast supports the El Gato Turbo.264 which has made a huge difference in the amount of time it takes to convert video. I wonder if Yoav could add Turbo.264 support to iTiVo?
- Bob

iTiVo already supports the Turbo.264

(although ymmv, since I don't have one to test with.. I'm told that the current iTiVo has gotten the bugs ironed out)

In other 'hopeful' news though. Sounds like snow-leopard will add support for openCL, which means ffmpeg and mencoder and friends will be able to use the GPU to do the encoding, which will speed things up TREMENDOUSLY... but that's all 'in the future'...

[erichoth]

Thanks everyone for the replies. It looks like iTivo will work for getting and converting files for me. I don't need anything too fancy and it seems to do what I need so far. I like the interface and I'm a big fan of open source stuff so that works for me.

I'll try out pyTivo as soon as I get a chance, but hopefully it will also work for me.

[westside_guy]

If you're on a Mac, I'm guessing you're using iTunes for music. The only solution I've found that actually uses iTunes playlists and can handle AAC is the free Tivo Desktop for Mac. It's a poor cousin of the Windows version since it doesn't handle the video sharing; but there are great tools for video sharing available for free (pyTivoX, pyTivo, streambaby) which frankly are better than Tivo Desktop anyway.

Note that to handle AAC you'll have to install lame; and you don't want the current version because its support of 256kbps AAC is broken (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=6983436#post6983436).

[JoeTaxpayer]

It's a poor cousin of the Windows version since it doesn't handle the video sharing.

There's a simple Terminal command to activate;

Open Terminal
Enter the following command and press enter

defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo -dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool true

Don't know where I got it, but it activates the video viewing, TiVo can see the videos iTiVo pulls down. FWIW, iTiVo absolutely rocks. Yoav has the patience of a saint answered my endless stupid questions, and I'm all set on my Macs and TiVos.

[solutionsetc]

I have Toast... in fact I think I have tried everything. I prefer TiVo Desktop for music as it supports my iTunes play lists... the others don't.

For hosting videos I prefer PyTiVoX as it supports streaming and a folder based hierarchy.

For transferring to the Mac and iPhone I prefer iTivo. Going to iPhone is almost automatic as it will drop commercials, transcode to iPhone format, and dump the file to iTunes.

For editing/authoring I use Toast to convert to AIC and use Final Cut. I know I could use TiVo Decoder and MPEG Streamclip to do this, but Toast is faster (although it does suck the processor dry).

Bottom line is if you don't already have Toast I see very little reason to buy it.

HTH