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[ I try to keep this post updated and current, so check back often! -windracer ]

A TiVo is much more than just a souped up digital VCR. What separates TiVo from your cable company’s generic DVR (other than the awesome features of TiVo service itself) is the wide range of (mostly free) applications you can use to enhance your TiVo experience. I’ve written about some of these applications here before (like Galleon, streambaby, and pyTivo) but I figured one comprehensive write-up might be in order.

First off, all of these apps require a TiVo with an active service subscription. For those of you with the old DVD-combo units (like the Toshiba TX-20 or Pioneer 810h), this means you need to have the TiVo Plus service, not TiVo Basic. I’m not discussing hacked boxes here either. You’ll need to know your Media Access Key (MAK), which can be found under your account on tivo.com or on your TiVo under Messages & Settings, Account & System Information, Media Access Key. Finally, my experience is with running these apps on Windows and Linux. I’ve tried to fill in as many Mac details as I could, where possible, but just be aware that my coverage of the Mac side is less than complete.

Ok, let’s jump in! First, the basic stuff.

TiVo Desktop

[Windows, Mac] I have to start with TiVo’s own application, TiVo Desktop. The free version allows you to publish the music (in MP3 format) and photos (JPG, GIF, etc.) on your PC so you can access them from the TiVo interface. The Windows version of TD also allows you to download recordings from your TiVo (as long as they’re not copy-protected) to watch on your PC, or send previously downloaded content back to the TiVo for viewing on your television (as long as they’re in MPEG-2 format). Do you want to download every episode of “Robot Chicken” that your TiVo records? Set up an auto-transfer and TiVo Desktop will automatically download them for you in the background. If you’re a Mac user and want to download your shows, you’ll unfortunately need to purchase Roxio’s Toast Titanium product. The free version of TiVo Desktop for the Mac only serves up music and photos.

Back on Windows, if you upgrade to TiVo Desktop Plus for $25, you’ll gain the ability to automatically transcode your downloaded recordings to a variety of portable formats (like for your iPod) and send more formats back to your TiVo (like Divx/Xvid or Matroska). Combining this with the auto-transfer feature, you can point TiVo Desktop at your iTunes folder where you download your video podcasts and have them automatically pushed up to your TiVo once iTunes downloads them. Before you shell out your $25, though, check out the rest of the applications below since you can get all of the same functionality of TiVo Desktop Plus (and more!) for free if you don’t mind tinkering with other third-party software solutions.

One tip: if your music isn’t in MP3 format, try Dan203′s Universal Audio Plugin, which adds support for unencrypted AAC, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis formats. If all of your music is DRM’ed (i.e., purchased from iTunes), you’re out of luck … even the free stuff below won’t be able to play those files.

TiVo App

[iOS/Android] In January 2011 TiVo released an iPad app for the Premiere platform. Since then, updated releases have brought compatibility with the iPhone and limited support for the Series3 and TiVo HD boxes … and it’s free. Finally in January 2012, an Android version was released, but it currently only works with phones or 7″ tablets (although you can sideload the APK to get it running on larger tablets).

When used with the Premiere, the TiVo app lets you manage your To Do List, set up Season Passes, browse the TV Guide, etc. without interfering with that the TiVo box is doing. My wife can be watching “Modern Family” and I can set a Season Pass for “The Cape” without touching the remote and interrupting her viewing. Or I can look up what other work Ed O’Neil has done without using IMDb.

The app also includes a virtual remote so you can “interfere” with the TiVo from the iPad, changing channels, controlling Live TV (trickplay), adding Thumbs ratings, etc.

Season Pass Manager

[all platforms] Adding to the existing features of being able to view your Now Playing and To Do lists online, the Season Pass Manager lets you re-order, copy, and delete the Season Passes on your TiVos from your web browser through your account on tivo.com. This can particularly be helpful when setting up a new TiVo (letting you quickly copy the SPs from your old box to the new one) or for easier mass-reorganization (say, during the new Fall TV season) without having to endure multiple “please wait” screens doing it on the TiVo directly. Unfortunately, WishLists, manual recordings, and Guru Guides aren’t supported in the SPM so if you use any of those they won’t appear online. Thus the order shown in the browser might not exactly match what’s on your TiVo.

TiVo Commander

[Android] Back in August 2011, after some careful examination of the TiVo iPad app, TiVo Community Forum user arantius released his TiVo Commander app for Android. While not as polished or full-featured as its iPad counterpart, the app does give Android owners the virtual remote feature and the ability to browse your My Shows or do searches from the couch without disrupting your viewing (although it only works with the Premiere boxes).

Unfortunately the app was recently removed from the Android App Store due to copyright concerns but if you have the wherewithall to sideload apps onto your Android device, you can still install TiVo Commander.

So that covers the basics every TiVo owner should know about. Now for the more advanced topics to really help you get the most out of your TiVo.

pyTivo

[Windows, Mac, Linux] Written in the Python scripting language, pyTivo is a free application similar to TiVo Desktop except it supports sending a wider variety of video formats to Series2 and Series3 TiVo boxes. Using pyTivo’s web interface (or by directly editing the configuration file) you can set up the plugins you want (i.e., video and music) and then configure the shares pointing to where your files are located. You can then use the TiVo interface to “pull” files onto your box (just like TiVo Desktop) or use the web interface to “push” them there.

The beauty of pyTivo is its use of ffmpeg behind the scenes to transcode a file into a format that your TiVo recognizes (MPEG-2 for video, MP3 for music). You can throw any video file format that ffmpeg supports at your TiVo and have it play: MP4, AVI, WMV, MKV, FLV, just about anything. It’s amazing … and the resulting quality is pretty good too! One drawback to this method is that it takes CPU power to convert video files from one format to another. Depending on the speed and power of the PC running pyTivo, you may or may not be able to watch the video as it’s being transferred onto the TiVo. Because of this, pyTivo works best (for me anyway) when you want to kick off a transfer for something you will be watching later.

Another cool pyTivo feature is its support of multiple levels of subfolders. No matter how you have your videos organized on your PC, TiVo Desktop always shows them in a flat list. The software will look two subfolders deep for accessible videos, but you’ll still get just one long list when browsing your PC’s Now Playing List from the TiVo. With pyTivo, however, whatever folder structure you use on your PC is what you’ll see when browsing from the TiVo. So if you want to have a path like Movies > Science Fiction > Star Wars > Clone Wars, pyTivo can handle that.

Finally, pyTivo supports metadata. When you download a .TiVo file it has a lot of information embedded into it: show name, air date, actors’ names, etc. Other video types don’t have this extra data, so when you transfer them back to your TiVo via TiVo Desktop, the resulting recording in your Now Playing List will be missing all of that “stuff.” pyTivo will read this extra information from a specially formatted text file and then send it across when the video is uploaded back to the TiVo. Rather than creating these text files by hand, grab the excellent MetaGenerator utility which lets you search for movies and TV shows in several online databases and then creates that metadata file for you. Using metadata also allows you to group shows in folders once they are on the TiVo!

As you can tell by my somewhat lengthy write-up here, pyTivo is hands down the application I use the most … it’s a must-have for any TiVo owner with an extensive digital video library. It can be a bit daunting to set up at first, if you’re not used to tweaking text-based configuration files or playing with metadata, but once you do get it working you’ll find it was well worth the time and effort.

Tip: if you need a quicker, easier setup for pyTiVo on Windows, try the Windows installer to get you going. Just keep in mind that it sometimes lags behind the current codeline so you may run into bugs or be missing out on newer features. If you’re a Mac user, check out pyTivoX which is an OS X front-end to both pyTivo and streambaby.  Either way, be sure to visit the pyTivo forums and check out the wiki.

pyTivo Video Manager

[Windows, Mac, Linux] A relative newcomer to the scene (as of April 2011), pyTivo Video Manager is an ‘HME for Python‘-based front end for pyTivo. It’s great that you can use a web browser to push videos to your TiVo through pyTivo, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that from the TiVo itself instead of a PC, even pushing to a different TiVo than the one you’re using? You can do that with pyTivo Video Manager.

Once you have pyTivo and push up and running (it’s obviously a pre-requisite) you can install Video Manager and edit the config file to point to your existing pyTivo setup. Since Video Manager is an HME application, it shows up under the Showcases menu of your TiVo, not the Now Playing List so don’t look for it there. It will also automatically adjust between the SD and HD interface depending on your TiVo display settings. Once you select pyTiVo Video Manager on your TiVo, you’ll see the same folder hierarchy you’ve got set up for pyTivo and you can start browsing your video library. All of your existing metadata (i.e., program descriptions) is used and displayed, just like pyTiVo. After selecting a video you have the option to Push or Delete it. Selecting Push will then prompt you with a list of your TiVos you can push to. Once selected, Video Manager hands the transaction off to pyTivo which handles the push request the rest of the way and transfers the selected video to the TiVo.

One neat addition, if you’re using the the HD interface, is cover art. I used ThumbGen to download cover art files for all of my movies and placed them in the proper directories along with the video files so they are displayed on the Video Manager screen (as you can see in the screenshot to the left). Again, the HD interface is nice because you see and do everything on a single screen.

Version 2.0 (released in September 2011) was a total rewrite of the app and introduced virtual shares based on metadata tags. So if you want to group all of your movies by genre, for example, or create a virtual folder of only 5-star movies, you can do that.

If you do decide to give pyTiVo Video Manager a try, be sure to check into the support thread on TCF.

Galleon

[Windows, Mac, Linux] One of the older third-party applications out there, Galleon started out as JavaHMO back in 2003 and is a sort of swiss army knife of TiVo applications. In addition to providing the standard download (ToGo), upload (GoBack), and music and photos functionality like TiVo Desktop, Galleon lets you do other things like view local weather, traffic, or theater listings, read your e-mail, browse your Netflix or Blockbuster rental queues, even parse your iTunes library for music playback (MP3 format only).

One neat feature of the ToGo app is that you can initiate downloads of recordings from the TiVo itself rather than from the desktop application. You can even start to download a recording from a different TiVo in your house. Similar to TiVo Desktop’s auto-transfers, you can set up rules in Galleon’s ToGo application for automatic downloads as well.

Galleon was abandoned by its original developer, Leon Nicholls, some time ago, but a few people are still working on it occasionally. I personally have contributed a few features to the Weather and ToGo apps and fixed a bug or two in the Movies app.

StreamBaby

[Windows, Mac, Linux] StreamBaby (aka stream, baby, stream) is another application (written in Java) that allows you to transfer video from your PC to the TiVo. Unlike using pyTivo to transfer (i.e., copy) a video file to your TiVo, StreamBaby actually streams the video, similar to what the TiVo does for Netflix streaming. This means that you can actually fast-foward to a section of the recording that hasn’t been transferred yet (complete with thumbnail previews so you can tell what section you’re actually going to)! If you have to stop playback, StreamBaby remembers where you were so you can resume the stream from that point later on.

Just like pyTivo, you point StreamBaby to your video folders via a text-based configuration file. Your preciously organized folder hierarchy is preserved when browsing from the TiVo (multiple subfolder support) and if you’ve got metadata text files for your videos, it supports reading those as well.

Also like pyTivo, StreamBaby is accomplishing its “magic” with ffmpeg, so you can stream any video format (supported by your build of ffmpeg) to your TiVo Series3 (original OLED and TiVo HD) or Series4 (TiVo Premiere) box. The Series2 boxes don’t support streaming, however, so StreamBaby won’t work with that older platform. Again, if you’re a Mac user and want to play with StreamBaby, try the pyTivoX front-end.

TiVoPlayList

[Windows] A TiVo Desktop replacement, TiVoPlayList (TPL) lets you download unprotected recordings and use auto-download rules but adds some extra bells and whistles like the option to shut down the PC when all transfers are complete. For the people who like to see how much space is being used on their TiVo’s hard drive, TPL can show you the size of each recording on disk along with total disk space used and available. You can even see this information in a nice graph. You can also export the list of recordings in a comma-separated format if you like. TPL is only for downloading recordings, however, so it can’t completely replace TiVo Desktop (no music, photos, or GoBack support). It’s a handy utility to have around, however.

kmttg

[Windows, Mac, Linux] If you’re looking for an easy way to download, trim, and re-encode video from your TiVo in an automated fashion, kmttg might be the answer. The middle scroll area of the application is your standard Now Playing List showing you the recordings on each of your TiVos (in a tabbed interface). Select the recordings you want to download, and then click on the checkboxes along the top of the window to build your post-download batch processing job. You can have kmttg automatically generate metadata files for pyTivo, convert the downloaded .TiVo file into a plain MPEG-2 format, and then re-encode the video into a format of your choosing (again, using ffmpeg) for your portable device or for eventual transfer back to your TiVo. If you own one of the excellent VideoReDo products (I highly recommend them, well worth the money for MPEG-2 file editing), you can also have kmttg run the downloaded MPEG-2 file through VRD’s Quickstream Fix feature (to fix any quirks in the video) and AdDetective (to remove the commercials).

Thanks to the reverse engineering effort of the new iPad application protocol over on TCF , the latest version of kmttg includes a “remote control” section that, in addition to letting you control your TiVo from your PC, also gives you the ability to view, download, and save information like your Season Passes or To Do List.

kmttg is written in Java so it runs on all platforms (but VideoReDo is Windows-only).

Web Browser

[all platforms] This isn’t really an application, but more of a tip: you can use a browser to easily download recordings from your TiVo. Just point your favorite browser to https://{your TiVo’s IP address} and log in with a username of ‘tivo’ and your MAK as the password. This is a bare-bones way to pull shows off of your box (you can’t queue up multiple transfers, for example) but it works in a pinch.

To be able to play those .TiVo files you download, however, you’ll need to either install TiVo Desktop for the DirectShow codec or use something like tivodecode to convert it into a plain MPEG-2 file you can view in the player of your choice (like Windows Media Player or VLC).

For even more great information on these tools I’ve just described, check out bkdtv’s excellent posts on downloading and viewing videos over on the TiVo Community Forum. You can find me over on TCF as well.

Now, go have fun getting the most out of your TiVo!

Related posts:

1. Stream, Baby, Stream
2. Stream to your TiVo
3. TiVo releases 9.4 software update
4. Manage your TiVo Season Passes online
5. The terrabyte TiVo!