tivo to-go...

I am currently writing my blog stuff and reading my websites on the train while watching a documentary about Jupiter's moon Europa that I TiVo'd off the science channel and transferred to my laptop.

Yay for TiVo, right? Not quite.

The only reason I was able to do this on a Mac was that the DRM copy-protection used by TiVo was cracked by hackers. Once this happened, it took exactly ONE WEEK for someone to write software for the Mac to handle the transferring and decoding of shows. One week.

I don't want to get into a philosophical argument about DRM and the ethics of breaking such restrictions, my point is this... TiVo has been promising to bring this functionality to the Mac for something like a year and a half. (Windows users have been able to perform these transfers with official TiVo-provided software for quite some time.) And they keep putting us off and putting us off and making excuses... and here, a couple of guys working for free have given us what the company couldn't provide. They should be ashamed of themselves. What will their reaction be? Probably to change the DRM and break the hack that makes their product more useful to a large fraction of their customers. What SHOULD they do? Hire the guys who wrote this software to make official TiVo To Go software available for the Mac in early 2007.

(end rant.)