Brad is a prophet. In his post earlier this week about Decrypting TiVo Recordings on a Mac, he said, "Check out Dave's post for instructions on building your own command line. Or wait a few days until someone comes out with a front end for the program."
Right on cue, the front end has been released and it's called TiVo Decode Manager.
The program throws a GUI on top of the convoluted process that was previously required and effectively automates the moving and decoding of TiVo files onto your Mac.
Current limitations are listed as follows:
Current limitations:
- Only one file can be downloaded at a time.
- The progress bar may not be completely accurate.
- The resulting MPEG-2 files are likely unplayable in Quicktime and may require a player such as VLC or MPlayer.
- This has only been tested on a limited number of Intel Macs.
- Download location is currently limited to one's Desktop.
- This is an unsupported product, and there may be many other bugs.
The TiVo Decode Manager site states that, "DO NOT SHARE COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. This is intended your own private use to play TiVo files on your Mac until such time that there is an official way of doing so. "
Well stated. Now go have fun.
1. This article is confusing two separate applications: TiVoDecoder and TiVoDecode Manager. TiVoDecoder (http://inik.net/node/97) is a great drag-and-drop app to take already-downloaded TiVo files and make them MPEG-2. TiVoDecode Manager (http://www.thebenesch.com/tdm) goes one step further and connects to your TiVo, lists your shows, and then downloads and decrypts them.
Posted at 10:56AM on Dec 8th 2006 by David Benesch