Roxio Monday launched Toast 10 Titanium for Mac OS. This new update to Toast adds a number of features, but most significantly for Mac OS users it includes an implementation of ‘TiVoToComeBack’, video transfers to a TiVo, which they’re calling Mac2TiVo. This has been sorely missing from any official solutions for Mac OS using TiVo owners.

Toast 10 Titanium also includes AVCHD Archive, which makes it easy to burn content form HD camcorders to BD or DVD, Web Video To Go, which allows users to grab video from websites to save locally or transfer to portable devices, place-shifting support which streams content from the Mac to a Streamer application on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and a number of others.

Toast 10 Titanium goes on sale today at http://www.roxio.com/ for $99.99, with special pricing at MacWorld Expo January 5-9. The High-definition/Blu-ray Disc (HD/BD) plug-in, which is required to author BD discs and is normally $19.99, is available free to those who purchase Toast 10 Titanium from http://www.roxio.com/ through February 5, 2009. Toast 10 Titanium Pro is also available for $149.99.

Press release:
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The Courier-Mail is reporting that Seven Network will begin rolling out network features to the Australian TiVo next month, including YouTube support, video on demand services, and TiVoToGo. Internet services have always been a key part of Seven Networks plans for TiVo. The Australian TiVo only works with free, over-the-air channels, which are limited in number - only 15 expected by mid-2009. To better compete with Foxtel’s pay TV service Seven will be able to use TiVo’s Internet capabilities to deliver additional content.

Lifehacker has an article today about a TiVo tool called KMTTG. KMTTG, which apparently stands for Kevin Moye (the author) TiVoToGo, is a Perl/Tk program that… well, I’ll let Kevin explain it:

kmttg is a Perl/Tk program I wrote to facilitate TivoToGo (TTG) transfers that can download, create metadata, decrypt, run comskip & comcut (commercial detection and removal) and re-encode multiple shows you select from your Tivos all in 1 step. The program also has the capability to transfer and process shows automatically from your Tivos based on titles and keywords you setup.

In slightly less geeky speak that means kmttg can download content from your TiVo via TiVoToGo. Parse out the program information and description, the metadata, and save it. Decrypt the TiVoToGo .tivo file into a standard MPEG-2 file. Run an application called ‘comskip’ which analyzes the video and marks where it believes the commercial breaks are. Then call ‘comcut’ which takes the information comskip provided and removes the commercial breaks from the video. And finally it can then take that video and transcode it into other formats, such as H.264 for your portable device.

Now, it doesn’t do all of this itself. In fact kmttg is really a wrapper of scripts written in Perl with a user interface written in Tk which automates and abstracts several other applications such as curl, TiVoDecode, mencoder, ffmpeg, comskip, etc. So you could do all of these steps manually and individually, but kmttg makes it much simpler and easier.

Installing and using kmttg is probably not for the technophobe. You need to have Perl and Tk installed on your system, and neither is standard on Windows. You’ll need to install a Perl distribution, such as ActiveState ActivePerl, and possible manually install Tk as well. kmttg is available for Windows and Linux, though since it is Perl and the prerequisites, or their equivalents, exist for Mac I bet a technically savvy Mac user could produce a working Mac version as well. Going by the kmttg discussion thread at TiVoCommunity, it looks like it has been tried.

kmttg looks like a nice tool for those who want to extract video from their TiVo and use it elsewhere. It is a free alternative to TiVo Desktop Plus on Windows, and it has features like commercial removal which TDP lacks.

If you have, or know of, a TiVo-related application I’ve missed, let me know.

Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 is being updated and it is now known simply as Roxio Creator 2009. This is Roxio’s premier media creation and authoring package for Windows. Creator 2009 has a new UI and supports HD content from AVCHD camcorders and transfers from HD TiVos for Blu-ray discs with a free HD/Blu-ray plug-in, a $29.99 value (a limited time offer). You can also easily share your content online via a free, secure Roxio web page or via YouTube. Roxio Creator is the only officially endorsed authoring tool for TiVoToGo on Windows.

Through September 30, 2008 you can buy Creator 2009 for $79.99 (after $20 Mail-in Rebate) and receive the High-Def/Blu-Ray Disc plug-in (a $29.99 value) free. So that’s a $129.98 for $79.99.

Roxio issued a press release to detail all of the changes and improvements in Creator 2009:

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Roxio Easy Media Creator is only commercial video editing tool for the PC officially listed as compatible with TiVoToGo files. Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 Suite has an MSRP of $99.99, currently $79.99 with a $20 rebate. But Buy.com is selling Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 Deluxe Suite for just $48.99 after a $30 rebate. The Deluxe Suite has an MSRP of $129.99, so that’s over 62% off MSRP! What makes it ‘Deluxe’, and why the higher MSRP? Because the Deluxe Suite is the full standard Suite plus a Dazzle USB video capture device. So you can buy Easy Media Creator 10 Deluxe Suite for $78.99, turn in the $30 rebate, and have it for just $48.99 - less than the standard, non-Deluxe, Suite. Good deal.

And for the Mac users, Roxio Popcorn 3 is one of the two officially endorsed packages for Mac (the other is Roxio Toast 9, of course). The MSRP is $49.99, but Buy.com is selling it for $29.99 with a $10 rebate - just $19.99.

The deals are only good through 7/20.

Alex over at TiVo Blog uncovered another nice TiVoToGo application for the Mac, TiVo Butler. I’m not a Mac user so I can’t try it out myself, but it looks like TiVo Butler has a lot of nice features, and TiVo Blog has a number of screen captures of the client.

As the cliche goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Since TiVo’s support for the Mac has lagged (far) behind their Windows clients, and the only official TiVoToGo solution for the Mac is paid-for software from Roxio, now the Mac probably has nicer 3rd party clients than any other platform.

It seems the TiVoToGo problems reported with Roxio software on the Mac last November still linger. While a patch was issued in November, it seems that it didn’t resolve the issues for all users. Today both Zatz Not Funny and CNET News.com wrote about the troubles. ZNF cited this post at TiVoCommunity made by Roxio rep patatrox yesterday:

We’ve been running a limited beta with a small number of users from the forums to test an update to both Toast 8 Titanium and Popcorn 3 and we’ve had positive results. We’re going to expand the testing for more users who are still having audio/video sync issues, please send me an e-mail to toastfeedback@roxio.com.

We’re going to extend this to about 50 users from TiVoCommunity.com and after a short time if feedback is positive move towards releasing this as an official update. Please keep in mind I will only be contacting users who are accepted for testing.

Please include the following information:
- Name
- Product you own (Toast 8 or Popcorn 3)
- TiVo Service Number (TSN)

If you’re having trouble with Roxio Toast or Popcorn and TiVoToGo on your Mac, you might want to jump on that.

TiVo made a statement to News.com for their article:

“It is important to us that all TiVo subscribers using TiVoToGo receive the same great TiVo experience whether they are utilizing a PC or Mac,” the company said in a statement to News.com. “It has been brought to our attention that a small subset of customers using Toast 8 have experienced a problem when trying to transfer their shows. We have been working with our partner Roxio and currently have a fix in beta.”

Roxio product manager Patrick Nugent said that they’ve been working with TiVo to fix the issues an that it affects “a small number of users.” He also said that it has been difficult to fix because it has been hard to reproduce and it doesn’t happen with ever recording.

Hopefully the code now in testing will be the final fix. Of course, there are other alternatives for Mac users. Such as the TiVo NowPlaying Widget, SeasonPassGetter, TiVoDecode Manager, and others.

This past weekend my friend Jer pointed me to an ‘Ask The Readers’ post on Lifehacker in which Gina Trapani put out the call to TiVo users for their favorite TiVo tips and tricks. It seems Gina, sorry, ‘a friend’ of hers, recently picked up a TiVo Series3. A slew of reader responses flowed in, and I put in my two cents as well. I’ve been meaning to post about it here since Sunday, but this week has been a little crazy and I’m just finally getting to it. If you have any tips and tricks that haven’t been posted, I encourage you to drop a comment at Lifehacker.

One of the suggestions was on using the free Videora TiVo Converter to convert video downloaded from the Internet for transfer to the TiVo (via TiVoToGo/TiVoToComeBack). Gina turned this into a Lifehacker feature article, providing step-by-step instructions for Windows users on how to use the Videora TiVo Converter in this way.

TiVoBlog has a great post from guest blogger Todd Barber. It walks you through taking a recording from your TiVo and extracting video clips from it on a Mac, even preparing those clips for transfer to a TiVo. While it is Mac specific, the general concepts would work on a PC, you just need equivalent software packages. If you have a Mac and TiVo, check it out.

(I’m sitting in the LV airport, waiting for my flight home.)

Roxio is running three promos November 21-28 for ‘Black Friday / Cyber Monday’.

SAVE $50 - Buy Roxio’s EMC 10 and Back On Track 3 Suite Together

Get a FREE copy of Roxio Buzz ($19.99) with a purchase of Easy Media Creator 10

Buy Toast 8 Titanium and Get 3 Menu Style Packs for only $9.99 ($50 savings)

So, if you’ve been thinking about picking up this software to use with your TiVoToGo transfers, this might be a good opportunity.