TVHarmony AutoPilot (free!) has always offered leading edge TiVoToGo desktop software, being the first with scheduled downloads and commercial skip functionality. I traded several emails with Will of TVHarmony, and I’m impressed with what he’s accomplished (and what he has planned). AutoPilot Beta 2 converts to and from a much greater variety of devices and services. Taking a page from Galleon, AutoPilot utilizes HME to optionally schedule downloads and conversions directly from TiVo. While we’ve always been able to remotely download TiVoToGo content, AutoPilot has added some rudimentary place-shifting of previously converted content (think Orb). Will tells me the web streaming is still a work in progress, but he has a cocktail napkin of design notes to build on-the-fly PC conversion to stream content directly from the TiVo. How cool would that be?
Summary of new features:
- Converts videos for many new devices including Creative Zen, Cell Phones, GP2X, Archos, and Neuros video players.
- Downloads and converts video from Youtube.com, Video.Google.com, Archive.org, and other video sharing sites.
- Access AutoPilot from your Tivo via HME so you can schedule downloads and conversions from your living room.
- Logon to AutoPilot from the web including watching downloaded content from your web browser.
- Transfer your TiVo shows using your PSP web browser to watch video from the road.
- Multi-threaded for faster downloads and conversions.
It would be great to see a comparison of TVHarmony AutoPilot to ETiVo and DirectShow Dump. (I’m not really sure even of when you would use ETiVo rather than DirectShow Dump).
Thanks,
Louis