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If you hold down option as you click on the 'Tivo Desktop' icon in System Preferences, you will get a 'Videos' tab, which allows you to share from your Mac to your Tivo. This only works for the non-Direct TV Tivos, as it requires a Media Access Key (just the video part).

If you have a Direct TV Series two that's hacked, you've already got this functionality. TivoTool was an excellent way to get stuff to and from your Tivo, if you're a Mac user. Unfortunately, it was broken somewhat by 10.5, and hasn't been fixed to work without a bit a a workaround (deleting files on app startup.)

If you haven't hacked your DTivo yet, do it - it's not that hard, and the end result is pretty great - more record time, remote scheduling, season pass management, permanent 30-second skip, and it's wife-approved! (actually, wife-required now...)

My hardware:
DirecTiVo Series 2. The original 40Gig HD was removed and upgraded to a 160Gig drive about 2 years ago.
Powerbook G4 867MHz
Linksys USB100M

Most of the instructions to follow to upgrade HD are in these two threads:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.ph p?t=265929
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.ph p?t=250680

Software for Mac:
http://www.tivotool.com/

Most of the setup is automated, you just have to answer a couple of questions that pop up when you run the setup scripts. I enabled vserver and chose to have it load at bootup. I downloaded TivoTool and it provides a Mac interface to vserver. TivoTool basically does everything on the Mac that TiVoToGo does on Windows. The main difference - you have to hack your TiVo to run it (not that complicated).

As others have stated, I also feel that this is a slap in the face to Mac owners. I can't understand TiVo's mentality on this. It is absurd to think that there is nothing wrong with charging us for something that is freely provided to Windows users. With this mentality, there is no wonder that the hacker community has developed free tools for the TiVo that are actually better than the $69 Roxio program.

TivoTool is awesome. With it, you can rip movies from DVD (encode with mpeg4) and upload them to TiVo, as TivoTool has a "TivoServer" program built in!

The UK only ever got Series 1 hardware - is this likely to work with a series 1 device?

Incidentally, for some more of those infamous hacks might I recommend TivoTool for the Mac and my own cross-platform TivoPodcast for handling podcasts of digital radio.

Cheers,
Ian

Well, if you're using a Mac, you can use TivoTool.

Not sure what the Windows equivalent is, though you can probably still install vserver (from the site above) on your TiVo and pull programmes out that way. Check the TiVo hacking forums at Deal Database for more info.

yeah, that's stopped a lot of other people from making software to put things on my iPod i'm "not supposed to".

Actually, you can get it out of your DirectTivo. If its an earlier unit, you can get it out fairly easily. If its an R10, you need some soldering skills to change the PROM on the unit so you can change info on disk and have it work. Check out http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/ there is plenty of good info on extraction. Once you have the machine setup to export, I use TivoTool (mac) from http://tivotool.com/ to extract, convert to ipod format and stick it right into iTunes for me. I've hacked both my original hughes and my R10 to do extraction, its great.

I've got a Series 1 with Ethernet added, and I use Tivotool to pull shows off to my Mac. It works great, and the wait doesn't really bother me-- I just kick off the transfer and do other stuff while it runs. Dunno what kind of TiVo you've got or what you have to do to the video to get it onto a PSP, but you should definitely check out Tivotool.

Nice to see Tivo do something smart, for a change. This company has disrespected and disowned the Mac platform since Tiger came out. A *one line* fix for the Tivo Desktop software is all they needed to release for final Tiger compatibility. As of today, that broken version is still on their web page. It also doesn't include aac audio support; a minor thing on other platforms, but a snub to the Mac users who have large aac collections. That version also lacks significant functionality that it's Windows counterpart contains. Noteably the TivoToGo (video downloading) feature. This is why I wrote TivoTool.

One goal of TivoTool is to represent what I think TivoToGo should be like on the Mac. It looks like soon I will be able to directly compare. The other goal of TivoTool is to put a friendly front-end on some "hacking" tools. You see, that is the catch - you need to decrypt their MPEG2 video streams to have true freedom. This requires you open the device (void your warranty) and hook up it's drive to your Linux box. Since there are many types of Tivos and many software versions, this process is not as easy as it should be.

In no particular order, here are some points about TivoTool v TivoToGo:
* The Tivo network drivers are slow. Even with a USB2 device and hardware support, the drivers just don't take full advantage of what they have. Of course the enthusiast community has come up with faster drivers.
* Streaming video right off your Tivo and watching it on any computer in the house is cool (TivoTool does this). I don't forsee Tivo adding this capability anytime soon.
* With TivoTool, you can burn a DVD right from the main interface. TivoToGo requires that you purchase another program to do this.
* You also need to pay for some sort of MPEG2 codec. TivoTool uses MPlayer which has MPEG2 support.
* TivoTool can stream-compress to various formats such as avi and mp4 as you download it from the Tivo.
* Other stuff, I don't want to totally start comparing dick sizes. There is a Linux version of TivoTool though!

Finally, I should point out that this new software from Tivo will only work on a specific subset of Tivo hardware. Specifically the "Series 2" with software version 7.x. If you have a DirecTV Tivo, sorry. If you have a Series 1, sorry. If you are in the UK or Aus, sorry. Yes, TivoTool works with all of the above.

Also, notice the Mac platform was never mentioned in their press release. Only "iPod support". This *might* be bad news for the Mac platform, but I'm putting a little faith in Tivo because I still love their device and what it does for me. They can't just put in iPod support for Windows. That would be insane.

Or you could download TivoTool and download all the shows you already paid for onto your Mac.

For offline conversion (ie. you already have the .ty or .tivo), it includes a pre-compiled vsplit binary which will do the conversion on the command line. ffmpegx will also convert a .ty to a DiVX AVI.

Cheers,
Ian

Did Apple jump the gun? Not for me.