Yesterday the much-anticipated TiVoToGo transfer service was launched by the wildly-popular DVR manufacturer. Alas, it's only available on PCs (of which I've but one), although eventual Macintosh support is hinted at in their press release, which gives me hope as a new
DVR owner and home Mac user myself.
The skinny? If your TiVo DVR is connected to your home network and you have the TiVo Desktop 2.0 software installed on your desktop/laptop machines (which enabled viewing of Mac/Windows-based MP3 and image files on your networked TiVo box in v1), you can transfer shows recorded on your DVR directly to your computer(s) for remote viewing. Once transferred, you can also burn shows to DVD (using Sonic's MyDVD software- sold separately for Windows)- which to be honest, is the feature I'm after personally. Given TiVo's excellent support of Apple's iApps (iPhoto, iTunes) so far, I'd hazard a guess that iDVD/DVD Studio Pro integration is the Mac path they'll pursue for the same. There appears to be very specific, limited codecs supported by the service, as it reportedly also disables the transferring/burning of Macrovision-encoded streams such as Pay-Per-View or commercial content, for obvious reasons.
I'll be watching the connected devices space a lot more in the coming year, so if you have any great links/references/suggestions/etc. for new TiVo owners who aren't afraid to hack (of which I'm now one), please post a comment! In particular, if there's any way to get a bash prompt across the network (my limited attempts have only worked by using the serial port on the back of the DVR itself, not the network), I'm all ears.
Tivo came to live at our house this christmas as well! I found that there are some neat things you can make it do without opening the box(and voiding all sorts of things) from the "Tivo Hacks" book. I have safari bookshelf from oreilly so it didnt even cost my anything extra. The book also goes into some things that are available after opening the box.
I have also found the "Unofficial Tivo Hackers Guide" to have quite a bit of information about things that can be done with our little set top linux boxes. That can be found here
http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/
Good luck with you new friend. I hope it brings you( and your wife) as much joy as it brought me (and my wife!) :)
Awesome- thanks, Simeon!
(and it does appear 'blog comments are working again for you now- sorry 'bout that. :)
So far I've only had luck with hacking into a series 1 box, but will check out that link to see what can/can't be done with my new series 2. It seems they've locked a lot down with the newer models, but I've really only started playing.
On the other hand, just using an out-of-the-box TiVoalone has been a godsend- on a household level we spend far less time on the TV than we did before, and feel like we get FAR more out of it as a whole. Nice. :)