DoubleTwist Doesn’t Do TiVoToGo

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Yesterday’s other big news was the beta release of DVD Jon‘s DoubleTwist software – that aims to be the Swiss army knife of multimedia conversion, sharing, and syncing. The feature (rightfully) garnering the most attention is the behind-the-scenes conversion of DRM-ed iTunes into unprotected MP3s for playlist synchronization onto non-iPods. Though, being a video geek my first experiments were with TiVo content…

On a fairly clean Windows XP install (TiVo Desktop, minimal codecs), DoubleTwist was unable to play TiVoToGo content. In fact, the program didn’t see the video files (or directory) until I changed the file extension from .tivo to .mpeg. And as you can see above, once found, DoubleTwist doesn’t utilize TiVo’s .dll during playback. I was interested in seeing what would happen when syncing TiVo video to my iPhone and Nokia N95 as a possible free replacement for TiVo Desktop Plus, but I discovered device synchronization is currently limited to audio files.

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Speaking of that N95, DoubleTwist immediately identified the photos and videos I’ve shot – had I wanted to share them with someone. Though, that brings up a problem (for me) with this software. I imagine DVD Jon is a nice guy, but the required online registration and service connectivity is a major turn off. I want to convert, sync, and possibly share privately.

7 thoughts on “DoubleTwist Doesn’t Do TiVoToGo”

  2. I too would have loved to see TiVo support. Oh well, TiVo Plus and Roxio do a good job of getting tv to dvd.
    Oh, and today I figured ut that there is a mobile version of ZNF!

  4. Todd, there are several apps (including WMP) that utilize TiVo’s DirectShow .dll for playback… and conversion. In fact, the original gunk-stripping was done using DirectShow Dump which ran the video file through the .dll and saved the contents. Whereas TiVoDecode reverse engineered TiVo’s protection scheme. I’ve always thought the reason we didn’t see TTG on the Mac sooner was because TiVo wanted to implement a similar scheme on OS X: video files are only accessible while they’re being played, but retain protection when idle on the hard drive.

  5. If you just want to strip the DRM off your iTunes audio files, I’ve been using TuneBite for some time. Does kind of the same thing I understand DoubleTwist does, i.e. makes an MP3 file by recording, but it does it at double speed. You’ll get some weird sounds out of the speakers, and its a mild pain, but I’m not keeping any music in a protected format, sorry.

    I’ll try DoubleTwist soon. Had originally heard about it on BOL. The fact that it can also convert protected video (supposedly) is a nice addition.

  6. Ummm… okay, WTFIT?

    Its not really a media conversion program its a social network???

    So I have a few protected aac files under iTunes. I click the checkbox next to “free my music” and it starts converting? I’m not sure what it did really. Seemed like an automation playlist came and went in iTunes and the count decreased by one after a while (7 to 6, 1 converted), but then it got stuck. I saw no filenames mentioned, no idea where it put the mp3 files or whether it deleted the protected files. It appeared to get hung up, and then nothing happened after that.

    You don’t hear the audio while it is being recorded.

    Seems kinda odd. Would it work on video? I don’t know, the Wired blog post I read suggested it would. But now I’m not sure I’m gonna try it…

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