# Tivo Premiere And Mac



## corysontag (Jun 3, 2006)

BEFORE ANYONE JUMPS DOWN ME I HAVE READ ALOT OF PREVIOUS POSTS AND YES i AM NEW HERE (sorry for caps ) I purchased the Tivo Prem. and I am running a mac computer. I have not signed up for tivo service yet, however seems a great deal of things are already working. I have read I could watch my tivo on my mac computer and possibly get items transfered over to my apple tv and possible time machine ( if any knows how to transfer to time machine from apple tv please le tme know ) I am curious what steps I need to do I downloaded the free verision of tivo desktop but nothing happens, do I need other programs and so on. I thank you in advance


Cory


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## brasscat (Mar 31, 2002)

You need pyTivo. But I warn you, it takes hours to transfer an HD hour to your Mac.


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## StevesWeb (Dec 26, 2008)

corysontag said:


> I am curious what steps I need to do I downloaded the free verision of tivo desktop but nothing happens, do I need other programs and so on. I thank you in advance
> 
> Cory


If you already own a copy of Roxio Toast the recent versions include a program called TiVo Transfer that will let you copy non-DRM protected recordings from your TiVo to your Mac. For DRM protected programs you can not copy these from your TiVo. You may need to download an updated version of Toast to get it to work with a TiVo Premiere.

The excellent PyTiVo will let you access video files already on your Mac so that you can stream or copy them to your TiVo.

If you are using the Mac you referred to to sync your AppleTV then, unless you have excluded iTunes in your Time Machine Preferences, your Time Machine backups likely already contain your AppleTV content.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

brasscat said:


> But I warn you, it takes hours to transfer an HD hour to your Mac.


Eh, maybe not with a Premiere.

To the OP: The stuff that's already working before you sign up for service? It won't stay that way; you're getting a free trial. I'm not sure if network transfers are included in the trial.


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## bkdtv (Jan 9, 2003)

Network transfers aren't available with the free trial. You need to subscribe for that.

TiVo does have a 30-day money back guarantee; you can cancel service within 30 days for a full refund.

To download recordings from the TiVo, I suggest kmttg. With that software, you can download an hour of HD *in minutes*, not hours, using a Premiere. A video demo of that software is shown here on Youtube.


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## corysontag (Jun 3, 2006)

I am going to subscribe to my service tonight and see. i am trying to really view on my computer and possible to transfer to ipad. also if the tivo prem. talks to the appletv and I can get shows onn it does it do the reverse. I have not purchased any software or anything yet just the tivo prem.


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## bkdtv (Jan 9, 2003)

It may take 24 hours or so after "activation" for network features to become available. You might be able to speed the process by forcing several connections to the TiVo service under Settings -> Phone & Network.


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## Fist of Death (Jan 4, 2002)

bkdtv said:


> Network transfers aren't available with the free trial. You need to subscribe for that.
> 
> TiVo does have a 30-day money back guarantee; you can cancel service within 30 days for a full refund.
> 
> To download recordings from the TiVo, I suggest kmttg. With that software, you can download an hour of HD *in minutes*, not hours, using a Premiere. A video demo of that software is shown here on Youtube.


Warning: DO NOT USE KTTMG. It is buggy, does not generate useful error messages, and is a black hole for time. If you enjoy reading hex dumps, parsing cryptic error logs (i.e. 
*Server Busy*

Download failed to file: /Applications/kmttg_v0p7j/Cops - Philadelphia, PA Spokane, WA Des Moines, IA Coast to Coast (04_26_2010).TiVo
Exit code: 0), then proceed. Otherwise, find something a bit more polished.


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## Phantom Gremlin (Jun 20, 2002)

Fist of Death said:


> Warning: DO NOT USE KTTMG. It is buggy, does not generate useful error messages, and is a black hole for time. If you enjoy reading hex dumps, parsing cryptic error logs (i.e.
> *Server Busy*
> 
> Download failed to file: /Applications/kmttg_v0p7j/Cops - Philadelphia, PA Spokane, WA Des Moines, IA Coast to Coast (04_26_2010).TiVo
> Exit code: 0), then proceed. Otherwise, find something a bit more polished.


Ahhh, but there's the rub. What's "more polished"? kmttg has quirks and I also get frequent "Server Busy" errors. But it's the best software I've found so far.

I tried iTiVo, but it forces a conversion even though all I want is to download.

I tried https: directly to the TiVo, but that's much more time consuming.

I didn't try TiVo Desktop, because file downloads aren't supported on the Mac. Plus it's very buggy, people complain bitterly about it and its "Plus" variant.

The TiVo Home Media Features & TiVoToGo  forum might be a better place for further discussion.


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## brasscat (Mar 31, 2002)

wmcbrine said:


> Eh, maybe not with a Premiere.
> 
> To the OP: The stuff that's already working before you sign up for service? It won't stay that way; you're getting a free trial. I'm not sure if network transfers are included in the trial.


Oops, I use iTivo to transfer from Tivo to Mac, which does take about 3 hours for one hour of "House" to make the trip (from a Premiere). If there's something faster out there, please tell me!


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

PyTivo works great under Linux with my HD. So I will guess it works well under MacOS too. Good stuff.


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## bkdtv (Jan 9, 2003)

brasscat said:


> Oops, I use iTivo to transfer from Tivo to Mac, which does take about 3 hours for one hour of "House" to make the trip (from a Premiere). If there's something faster out there, please tell me!


With TiVo Desktop and a Premiere, you should be able to download an episode of House in 25 minutes or so. With kmttg and MPEG-TS mode enabled, you should be able to download the same episode in less than 15 minutes.

If it is taking you three hours to download an episode of House, then the network or PC configuration problem. My first guess is that you've got a 802.11g wireless network with a lot of interference, or you've got multiple wireless repeaters or repeater bridges (ex: multiple Airports), each of which splits your available wireless throughput. More info in this post.

If using a wired ethernet connection, then I would guess you have some older antivirus and system security software (ex: Kaspersky) that scans and processes all incoming traffic, slowing throughput by 80% or more. Most of these programs allow you to disable network monitoring for specific programs to avoid that problem.

Refer to the Premiere benchmarks to see what throughput you should see with the TiVo in classic mode on a wired network (or a MoCA network). Performance with the HDUI enabled is more variable, with dropoffs of 20 to 30%.


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## jtso (Oct 2, 2009)

brasscat said:


> Oops, I use iTivo to transfer from Tivo to Mac, which does take about 3 hours for one hour of "House" to make the trip (from a Premiere). If there's something faster out there, please tell me!


That sounds really slow. It takes me less than 2 hours to transfer a 1 hour HD show, going from a TiVo HD XL to a Mac via wireless N. I use iTiVo in "decrypt" format which seems faster than the other formats. I have a 1 TB external hard drive attached to my Mac specifically for storage of shows. I find that tranferring straight .tivo files via the web interface takes just about the same amount of time. I prefer the iTiVo method because it allows me to watch the shows on my computer as well as being able to transfer them back to the TiVo if I want (and pyTiVo or TiVo Desktop for Mac works fine for that).


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## Phantom Gremlin (Jun 20, 2002)

crxssi said:


> PyTivo works great under Linux with my HD. So I will guess it works well under MacOS too. Good stuff.


The OP wanted to get files from his TiVo to his Mac. I think PyTiVo only works the other way.

I haven't used PyTiVo directly on my mac, only as part of a combo package called pyTivoX, and I can confirm it works quite well in terms of sending stuff from my Mac to a TiVo HD.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

Phantom Gremlin said:


> The OP wanted to get files from his TiVo to his Mac. I think PyTiVo only works the other way.


You think wrongly.  The other way is the focus, though.


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## cautionespn (Feb 21, 2003)

Long time Tivo/Mac/AppleTV user here, currently using iTiVo to download with the Handbrake AppleTV setting for the encode. I'm on gigabit ethernet all around. Once the download and encode completes (about 1 hour 15 minutes for a 1 hour HD show on my dual quad core Mac Pro) I will take the resulting file and run it through iFlicks to properly tag the video and add it to iTunes for sync with the AppleTV. The process is quite painless and has enabled me to build up quite a library of TV Shows and movies from my TiVo.

I have tried kmttg and while the download is significantly faster, the encode portion isn't yet up to snuff (I have only gotten one good encode with this software to date). I'm willing to take the hit on time with iTiVo since the encoding for AppleTV is the long pole anyway.

Once the kinks are worked out of kmttg, I'll most likely switch over to it since it seems that iTiVo is no longer in active development (the current version hasn't changed in close to a year).


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

wmcbrine said:


> You think wrongly.  The other way is the focus, though.


Well, all the talk about hmttg so I tried that yesterday for the first time (with the TiVo HD). That, too, works very well under Linux (even though the HD's transfer rate is miserable). I tell you, though, as a test, I downloaded an hour-long 1080i show and transcoded from mpeg2/ac3/mpg to h264/ac4/mp4 (with deinterlace). OMG. My machine is NOT slow, and both cores were running at 100%.... it took 15.5 hours! The result was nice and played perfectly with mplayer.

I can see why someone might want to leave the stuff mpeg2 (even though it is almost 3 times larger than it needs to be). Gosh, a 2.5 hour movie would take 37 hours???


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## jtso (Oct 2, 2009)

crxssi said:


> Well, all the talk about hmttg so I tried that yesterday for the first time (with the TiVo HD). That, too, works very well under Linux (even though the HD's transfer rate is miserable). I tell you, though, as a test, I downloaded an hour-long 1080i show and transcoded from mpeg2/ac3/mpg to h264/ac4/mp4 (with deinterlace). OMG. My machine is NOT slow, and both cores were running at 100%.... it took 15.5 hours! The result was nice and played perfectly with mplayer.
> 
> I can see why someone might want to leave the stuff mpeg2 (even though it is almost 3 times larger than it needs to be). Gosh, a 2.5 hour movie would take 37 hours???


When I began experimenting with transferring shows to my Mac, I tried different formats on iTiVo and experimented with watching shows on my iPod. I eventually came to the conclusion that speed was most important to me and that I would rather leave things at mpeg2 and simply get larger hard drives if I needed space. Once I made that decision, the main focus was on adjusting my wireless network for maximum speed and reading TiVo Community board to learn little tricks to help things along.


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## NTIV10 (May 7, 2010)

I use pyTivo with my iMac i7 and it's quite speedy. The whole process of downloading (my home network is gigabit wired except for 802.11n for the laptops) and running through Toast to convert to a 720p MP4 takes less than an hour for an hour long show. Now I have my TiVo shows on my iPad 

Sad thing is, the Premiere interface is so frustrating, I am more and more frequently scheduling shows through tivo.com and watching them on my laptop or iPad... essentially using the TiVo only as a server :down:


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## DeWitt (Jun 30, 2004)

Just a quick shout out for KMTTG and PyTivo. I find this the best of the available options for moving content off/on the Tivo. (I would have described KMTTG as the most polished option available... so opinions vary) The combination of KMTTG and Py Tivo makes for an outstanding solution with a premiere. The network speed of the Premiere makes this a very workable real world solution.

And most important, both are actively supported in these forums.


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## AlexFL (Oct 2, 2010)

I didn't want to create a new post for this subject so I hope that this is the best place for me to post my question regarding KTTMG.

I recently purchased 2 Premieres and they've been working great. Transfer rates are between 93-97 MBps between Premieres. Great speed when it comes to transfering shows from one box to another, currently takes about 5 minutes to transfer an hour of an HD Program. So I decided to experiment this week with transfering shows to my computers. I'm running both Windows and Mac and after reading a few posts I decided to give KTTMG a try.

My issue is that I'm not finding a lot of information regarding troubleshooting and/or help on this program. So I'm hoping that someone can provide some information to my questions:

1- What benefit would I see by having pyTivo in addition to KTTMG? Does KTTMG only retrieves shows from the Tivo and pyTivo handles pushing them back to the Tivo?

2-I tested it first downloading an hour of "Big Break" (golf show). I had several things selected on top, like decrypt, ad detect, adcut, and atomic something else. The show downloaded pretty quick, not as quick as between Tivo's but I got up to 55MBps which took 15 minutes to download the hour show. However, then it decoded which it apparently was succesful doing but then it appears that it tried to do something with the Atomic Parsley and it fail. I'm not really familiar with the error messages that it's giving me at the bottom of the page but it's definitely not doing anything else after it. Any suggestions?

3- Do I have to select any specific format for the type of device I would like to eventually upload those files to? My wife has an iPhone and I have a Droid X so I would like to eventually transfer those shows into those devices and I'm not sure what format I should be converting these files into and where do I tell KTTMG to do that.

Thanks for any help that can be provided on this.


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## Phantom Gremlin (Jun 20, 2002)

AlexFL said:


> I hope that this is the best place for me to post my question regarding KTTMG.


There is a TiVo Home Media Features & TiVoToGo forum that may be more appropriate for this question.


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