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October 09, 2004

Getting TiVo recordings onto my laptop

How can I get a TiVo recording onto my laptop, so that I can watch it when I'm not sitting in my living room? I have all this content that I never have time to watch; if I could somehow copy it from TiVo to my Powerbook, I'd have plane rides, downtime at work, and all those other unused moments that could be filled with television-y goodness.

I've got a Series2 TiVo, on broadband and with the Home Media Option, if that helps things.
-- Jason Levine

October 9, 2004 in series 2, TiVo

Answers

It's a bit touchy to talk about extracting recordings from a TiVo because it's technically illegal to break the encryption on the newer models, even though it's well within your fair use rights to move a recording from one device to another in your home.

But here's the basics:

-- If you had a series 1 TiVo or DirecTiVo, you'd just need to add networking to it like a TubroNet card: http://www.9thtee.com/turbonet.htm

Then you'd want to get TyTools going on your desktop windows PC, to pull recordings over the network and do stuff with them. http://themurrays.homeip.net/downloads/tivo/extraction_articles/tytools_faq.html

Michael from Cruftbox wrote a good tutorial for his Series 1 DirecTiVo here: http://www.cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/tivoextraction.html

-- With a Series 2 standalone TiVo like the one you've got, there are two options. The legal and easy option is to simply wait another month or two for TiVo's new ToGo feature which will allow you to pull shows off your series 2 TiVo and watch them on your laptop.

http://www.tivo.com/5.3.1.1.asp?article=196

The illegal option is to break the encryption in your series 2 TiVo, so you can use something like TyTools to extract the video over the network. I won't go into details, but if you're searching around on the net for help, you'd be looking for the tivo "monte" hack, which should get you a command prompt on the TiVo and allow you to do additional things necessary to extract video files from it.

Unless you're pretty linux savvy, I'd suggest just waiting for TiVo's official release of the TiVo ToGo feature, which should be out soon.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 9, 2004 5:10:23 PM

I've had success with my Mac by using a Dazzle analog to DV converter. I'll hook the Dazzle converter up my Mac or DV camcorder and play the video on the Tivo. The Mac or camcorder will record the signal, and then I'll load it into iMovie to edit the video and then use iDVD to burn it to disk. You should also be able to encode the video in MPEG4 and use that.

This tends to be a bit more time-intensive because you have to play the video in real-time, but once it's in DV and iMovie, there's a ton of flexibility with respect to what can be done with it next.

Posted by: Chris Karr at Oct 9, 2004 7:55:28 PM

Just wait a couple of months for TiVoToGo to ship and moving videos to your laptop will be officially supported.

Posted by: MegaZone at Oct 9, 2004 8:29:58 PM

By the way, the "monte" hack is now considered somewhat obsolete. The new hack is called "killhdinitrd". See the DealDatabase forum for details.

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 10, 2004 2:32:28 AM

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