What Software do You use with TiVo?

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After I blogged recently about wanting to try TiVo, I was sent a unit to review for a few weeks. I’ve been wanting to try it out, so this was a great opportunity. With certain software, you can take programs you record on TiVo and transcode them on your computer. You can then turn them into videos you can watch on pretty much any device. All the DVRs I’ve had are boxes unto themselves, they couldn’t be networked in any way. By networking my TiVo, I can then do as I described, to create videos I can play on my computer, iPhone or any other device I wanted to use. Here are a couple of programs you can use to accomplish this.

TiVo Butler is an application that can track programs from multiple TiVo devices that you have on your home network. It’s free, and allows you to browse the recordings you’ve made on your TiVo. You can download them, encode them and much more. TiVo Butler is only available for Mac OS X.

However…

TiVo Playlist is the Windows equivalent. Everything that you could hope to do with your TiVo, you’ll be able to do with ease using TiVo Playlist.

1. Retrieve TiVo Now Playing lists over an ethernet connection and calculate total recording time and disk space used
2. Support for multiple TiVo units
3. Estimate free space remaining given the capacity of the TiVo hard drive(s)
4. Display either full List View or Folder View
5. Mouseover Title shows description of recorded show along with Year Released/Air Date, Actors, Director, etc.
6. View graphical representation of disk free space and space used by either recording status or recording quality
7. Export of Now Playing lists to CSV files for use in other programs such as Microsoft Excel
8. Batch downloading of recordings to PC (even from multiple machines)
9. Tested to run under Windows 2000 and XP Pro and reported to run under Windows 98/ME, XP Home and Vista
10. Works best at screen sizes 800×600 or larger if running 96dpi, or 1024×768 or larger if running 120dpi
11. Downloads to FAT32 partitions support up to 4Gb filesizes, NTFS partitions support files > 4Gb (Windows 2000/XP/Vista only)
12. Access via HTTP/HTTPS and requires TiVo software version 7.1 or newer

You know how to email me, if you have other DVR or TiVo software or tips to pass along to me! I’ll be glad to check them out and share them with the community.

• DishTVforPC.com.
• PCTV4Me.
• Voices.com - The Online Marketplace For Voice Actors.

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