Downloading movies from TiVo Series 3 HD Recorder to Macintosh

Question

Background:

I have a TiVo Series 3 HD Recorder purchased in Dec 2006. For the past few years, when I have wanted to archive something from the TiVo to my Macintosh, I used iTiVo. However, this application has many issues (crashes, freezes, very, very slow) and has not been updated in almost 2 years. My frustration with its "quirks" has prompted me to seek another solution. The only other Macintosh OS X software I have found via google is a Dashboard Widget (ick) called TiVo NowPlaying. This widget (versioned 2.51) has not been updated since Oct 2007. It's usable, but not ideal (slow, sometimes needs to be restarted and doesn't support mpeg4).

I am using fairly modern Macintosh (intel) computers, updated to the current version of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard).

Question:

What are other Macintosh + TiVo owners using to move content from their TiVo to the Macintosh?

I am hoping someone has some information on something better to use than the options I have listed above.

Answer 1

kmttg is a cross-platform Java program that does what you're looking for. Personally I've used it on Windows without issue to copy shows off my Tivo onto my computer, do a batch convert of the video files, along with batch rename. It's a very powerful and handy tool for any owner of a Tivo Series 3 or more recent Tivo. It should run on modern Macs without issue.

You can grab it off Google Code here. The Tivo Community forums have an extremely long-running thread about the tool here.