aprigliano.org: One cheapskate's stupid guide to getting programs off your Tivo (Macintosh)

Too often the world just passes me by while my head is somewhere in the sand. I did not know until recently that there exists two programs for the Macintosh that stuffs all the brilliance of $26 Tivo-To-Go program into two programs that, to my mind, are more stable and MORE feature rich than Tivo's own product.

You have held you breath long enough, iTivo and Pytovox are just two of the most beautiful free apps I have seen - simple, kind of pretty, and self explanatory. Both programs were wonderfly cobbled together by Yoav Yerushalmi and, frankly, I love this guy!

iTivo is THE app for getting programs off your Tivo Series 2, Series 3 or Tivo HD and re-encoding them for another device or backup. Amazingly, the list of the types of re-encoding it will do is long and comprehensive. And, as a bonus, this program has some commercial skip smarts that will remove the ads during the re-encode.

The only bits of information you need for this is the ip address of your Tivo and your MAK number - both of which I tell you how to get to easily.

The only weirdness I found with this program is on OS X, version 10.4.11, the program complained that it needed Growl but besides that - runs like a champ.

PyTivoX is ultimately a simple way to serve up video files to your Tivo. And it just plain works. Though it did not work on OS X 10.4.11 for me, it is still quite a brilliant little program for the latest OS X version. All you do is pick your video directories to share and hit apply. Then, on your Tivo, go to the 'Now playing' menu and pull in the video. There is also a 'StreamBaby' streaming function that works well for 4:3 content on Series 3 or HD Tivos, just browse 'Music, Photos, Showcases.'