It took two years and the software costs $100, but Mac-owning TiVo users can finally move recorded shows onto their Mac or iPod.
In a joint release Monday morning, TiVo and Roxio announced that Toast Titanium 8, available immediately, includes full TiVoToGo functionality. The announcement comes two years after the software was released for Windows and nearly as long since TiVo first promised it would be made available to Mac users.
The application is so long in coming that it appeared in the top 10 of the Wired News Vaporware Awards in 2005 and 2006, reaching No. 2 behind only the legendarily late Duke Nukem Forever.
The wait seemed to be over Jan. 7, 2006, when screenshots of a very early version of TiVo Desktop for Mac with TiVoToGo shown at Macworld San Francisco were posted to the TiVoLovers LiveJournal community. And then all of 2006 passed with nothing.
What took so long? Quite simply, programming for Mac OS X was harder than TiVo expected. Product marketing manager Amir Gharaat said his company did figure out how to transfer TV shows from its digital video recorders to Macs, but converting those files into iPod format and burning them to DVD was simply outside TiVo's expertise.
"The differences in architecture between Mac OS and Windows were significant enough that it posed a significant challenge for us and it took longer and was more complex than we anticipated," Gharaat said.
So, in 2006, TiVo looked to Roxio. Toast has been providing the ability to burn CDs on Macs since the first burners came to market, and Roxio's parent company, Sonic, makes MyDVD, which is used on Windows PCs to burn TiVoToGo transfers to disc.
Less than a year later, it's a key component of Toast Titanium 8. Beyond obvious look-and-feel issues, there are a few distinctions between Mac and Windows TiVoToGo. The Mac version can't automatically convert video to portable player formats. And only the Mac version adds videos to iTunes with correct metadata as part of the conversion process.
"This is going to be the only official Mac solution," said Adam Fingerman, Roxio's director of product development. "There have been some other Mac hacks and shareware things that have popped up, but those technically violate the (TiVo) terms of service."
The most prominent such solution is TiVoDecode Manager, a program that provides a graphical front end to a TiVo copy-protection-cracking utility. A pull-quote on the application's website (created by David Benesch) mocks TiVo vice-president Jim Denney, who told MacCentral in Nov. 2005, "We hope to have something in mid-2006."
The program's dubious lineage is in evidence, however, warning users only to use its DRM-cracking to access their own TV recordings.
Though guilt-free, the official Mac TiVoToGo is not free, unlike its Windows-compatible sibling and unofficial siblings.
Toast Titanium 8 retails for $100. Representatives of TiVo and Roxio say they are exploring ways to make the software more accessible to Mac users.
"We do think there are opportunities for packaging DVRs with (wireless) adapters and (Mac) software," Gharaat said. "There should be ways to make it easier to get it into a shopping cart and get it out, up and running with the whole ecosystem."
