Mac users with Tivos have long been left in the cold when it comes to downloading video from their Tivo to their Mac. Series 2 Tivo devices let you hook them up to your local network with a USB ethernet or wireless adapter. Once hooked up, they can make their daily calls to Tivo HQ over the Internet instead of using a phone line. You can use Tivo Desktop to share music, photos or even videos from your computer to your Tivo. But only Windows users have been enabled to download video in the other, much-treasured direction, from their Tivo to their computer, so that they can hoard video files like digital packrats.

The problem, according to Tivo, is that the features they need to secure the video are available to them under Windows but not under MacOS. Reading between the lines, it also seems that the Mac market has been small enough that they’re just not willing to spend the money to throw the necessary engineers at the problem. And if the video isn’t secure (they encrypt all the video) then the TV networks will probably try to sue them out of existence.

Recently Tivo’s encryption was broken, and soon after that Mac solutions for downloading Tivo video to a Mac were posted.

TivoDecodeManager is the latest and greatest. I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, but I present it to you for your edification. Use it while you can; I’d expect Tivo to force an update to their software to defeat the encryption crack as soon as they can.

TiVoDecode Manager: TiVoToGo for the Mac | PVRblog
[tags]tivo[/tags][tags]tivotogo[/tags][tags]macintosh[/tags]

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