Desktop Fun with your Tivo
I have two TIVO’s, one upstairs, one downstairs - I can easily move recorded shows between the two (pull, not push) - and recently I’ve discovered how easy it is to move recorded shows to my mac, so I can watch it while I pound away at work. I know there are lots of ways of doing this - and that’s fine - but hardly qualifies as FUN, my way requires a browser.
- I’m assuming your TIVO is on your network, if it’s not it should be.
- First login to your TIVO account on tivo.com and make sure you’ve allowed media transfers - and grab your ‘media access key’ while you’re there.
- Open any browser and key in your TIVO’s IP address - mine is https://192.168.55.12 - note that you’re doing this under a secure connection ‘https’.
- When challenged - your username is ‘tivo’ and your password is your media access key
Bam!, you should now be looking at a web interface that show you all your recorded shows - complete with links to download shows to your desktop. The files themselves are in ‘.tivo’ format - which is essentially a MPEG2 variant - playing it has it’s own challenges, it’s one of the few formats that VLC doesn’t play out-of-the-box, I’m sure there’s an easier way buy I toss them into VisualHub, and that seems to work nicely.
Of course the hidden gem in this is that although the files are pretty big (1GB+) if I opened up my router JUST right - my friends could access my TIVO’d content - and vice versa, just a thought - would seem to be a very sketchy use for VPN software too - but that remains to be seen, for right now it’s a curious example of poking at an local network IP while on the phone - which is exactly how I found this.
I’m whipping up a geektoolscript to keep me posted as to what’s ‘playing’ on my tivo, because I can, and because that’s the way I roll.
There are plenty of apps that will let you do this - most notably TivoButler, and Roxio’s TIVO Transfer (which is really excellent).