Something for the Mac users

No, not TTG (yet) – but NowPlaying (TiVo Widget)

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  • emarosan

    I’ve given up on TTG on Mac. Just too much on the empty promises, and we’ve all seen this pattern before in the Mac community, it = vapourware.

    I’m just waiting for some week where I don’t have anything I want to watch and watch everything on the TiVo and hack it. There’s some very good tools for Mac that interface with a hacked TiVo that have more functionality than TTG.

  • unteins

    The only bit of TTG that appears to be non-functional is the decryption.

    Which leaves 2 options, decrypt on a PC (or under VPC) or disable the encryption on the Tivo itself.

    I certainly hope that Tivo gets TTG for Mac soon, because my suspicion is that the Apple/Intel collaboration + Video iPod + Front Row (Apple’s Media Centerish software) = Apple DVR in the not so distant future.

    They probably won’t unseat Tivo any time soon, but they’d certainly spark a wave of Tivo sales on eBay among the Mac faithful :)

  • emarosan

    I don’t think Apple will release a DVR soon… Steve Jobs is very against the whole thing, and he’d rather you buy the TV episodes from the iTMS than record them.

    Front Row is still severely limited by the hardware (no TV output, especially component output, and no, it really isn’t that good from far away, especially seeing as most people don’t really place their computers in front of couches…)

    The MacTels might bring about a change in that direction, but those are still a good ways away. The lower level Macs will change first in the middle of next year, and it might take ’till the end of next year to upgrade the whole line, if that soon. Jobs won’t go for any sort of TV media + DVR convergence anytime before that… which means it’s more than a year from now.

    It’s been many months. If TiVo honestly wanted to get TTG working on the Mac, they would have done so by now, especially seeing it from a Software Engineering point of view given the working state of Mac TTG way back before its release. I just don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s sad, but it happens in the Mac world all too frequently.

    Which leaves me with one real alternative, hack the TiVo to disable the encryption, so I can put my TV shows on my PSP. The problem is finding a time to watch everything on my TiVo before that…

  • unteins

    If you have drive space you can always download the files to your mac, hack, then reupload.

    Unless the encryption removal hack prevents the tivo from playing previously encrypted files.

    You can download through the built in web server on the Tivo or you can get Galleon which works on the Mac to handle the downloads. It will also handle reinserting the files back on the Tivo.

  • megazone

    Completely off-topic… Why do people use ‘MacTel’ as the shorthand? It doesn’t roll off the tongue, and it seems there is a better alternative:
    MacIntosh – osh + el = MacIntel That flows, it sounds better, it doesn’t seem like a forced two-syllable replacement for ‘WinTel’. Which, itself, flows because of the same type of construction – joining at the overlapping phoneme.

    Yet I see ‘MacTel’ being used in many places. Seems like a lost opportunity. :-)

  • emarosan

    “Unless the encryption removal hack prevents the tivo from playing previously encrypted files.”

    It does, and that’s why I need to watch everything before hand…

  • emarosan

    lol I guess it comes down to laziness… not to mention people seem to strongly prefer 2 syllables over 3, even if it might be harder to say. *shrugs* I think “MacTel” is the one that’s sticking.