I had the opportunity to talk with TiVo Product Marketing VP Jim Denney last night regarding the updated features of TiVoToGo via the new 2.3 Desktop. Check out the details over on Engadget.
Mr. Denney mentioned his family uses TiVoToGo to burn DVDs for a portable player and to move content onto his Treo. Apparently SpongeBob SquarePants entertains both young and old alike. :)
In the near future I’ll be posting my impressions of speed, quality, size, etc of various conversions using 2.3… so stay tuned. For the moment, I can reassure the purists that DirectShow Dump still works.
Uh, I didn’t see anything in there about you kicking him in the grapes when not given a time table for OSX software….. GEESH, journalists….
Grape-kicking journalists don’t get second interviews. ;)
Like many others I’m anxiously awaiting both TiVo and Slingbox support on OS X. But no amount of grape-kicking will speed up developement. TiVo most definitely knows there is pent up demand for the product.
As to why it isn’t here yet, I can only speculate… I’ve always felt (as documented on the TCF) that keeping the file encrypted on the Mac could be a technological challenge. Decrypting should be pretty easy, but decrypting-while-streaming as they do in Windows using MS DirectShow may be hard to replicate in OS X. In Windows the file is only decrypted during playback, it’s never sitting there unprotected. Mac guru Dennis Wilkinson has also commented on possible technological challenges which could be holding them back.
Based on the recent Mac TiVo Desktop update, TiVo’s obviously moving towards OS X TTG support and has some skill available. Hopefully we’ll see something sooner rather than later.
It took Tivo over six months to add a download scheduler and bolt some purchased codecs onto their existing product.
When you consider the challenges involved in porting over a heavily Windows-dependent DRM architecture to the Mac, it’s not surprising to see they are taking a long time.