When I got my TiVo Bolt, I spent a little bit of time figuring out how I could offload shows from the TiVo to one of my computers. There used to be an official program from TiVo, but they discontinued that several years ago. I’d heard a bit about cTiVo for the Mac and PyTiVo for Mac/PC/Linux, but after taking a quick look, I decided that they were both probably too complicated to deal with at the time.
Back in March, TCM had a little Kurosawa marathon, and I recorded five movies from that. And, of course, then I just left them on the TiVo and never got around to watching them. This week, they started showing in the “going away soon” list, so I decided I should watch them, and maybe also look into offloading them from the TiVo.
So I went and looked into cTiVo again. It turns out that it’s actually really easy to install it and connect it to your TiVo. I’m having mixed success with it though. I set it to transfer Stray Dog and Seven Samurai last night. It copied Seven Samurai fine, but it only copied the first hour of Stray Dog for some reason. So I’m transferring Stray Dog again. It’s taking quite a long time to transfer and encode files, and I’m a little unclear as to whether it’s the transferring and/or the encoding that’s the issue. Well, either way, I’m going to leave it transferring some stuff while I’m at work, and see what it looks like after I get home.
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